In this video, David Kelley says that product design has become much less about the hardware and more about the user experience. People are now more and more focus on human-centered design, human-centeredness in an approach to design. That really involves designing behaviors and personality into products. Designers used to primarily build 3-D models and 3-D renderings that are shown as communicating their ideas. They get those objects that they’re designing and get them in motion, showing how they’ll be used. It can be seen that this way can make their job more enjoyable. In order to do that they’ve been forming internal video-production groups, in order to make these kinds of experience prototypes that show just what they mean about the man-machine relationship.
To explain this new, broader definition, David Kelley shows some examples of design in products, services and environments. The first and the most interesting one I think in this video is -- Prada New York. They wanted a new kind of store that had a cultural role as well as a retail one. And that meant actually designing custom technology as opposed to just buying things off the shelf and putting them to use.
The staff devices are all around the store. The merchandise that you're interested in -- can be scanned and then can be shown on any screen throughout the store. You can look at color, sizes, and how it appeared on the runway, or whatever. It's taken into the dressing room, and in the dressing room there are scanners so that staff person knows exactly what clothing you have in the dressing room. They can put that up on a touch screen and you can play with that, and get more information about the clothing that you're interested in as you're trying it on. The liquid crystal displays in the changing room is transparent. But if you push the button, the whole wall goes dark. So you can try to get approval, or not, for whatever you're wearing.
One of David Kelley’s favorite features of the technology is the magic mirror, where you put on the clothes. There's a big display in the mirror (plasma screen embedded in mirror for multi- angle viewing), and you can turn around -- but there's a three second delay. So you can see what you look like from the back or all the way around.
