The Battle for the Living Room

Where many see excitement and promise, the reality of consumer electronics is confusion and a focus on digital minutiae

In this commentary on the marketplace for high-tech consumer experiences, he points to a collection of problems, among them competing product platforms, contradictory and unanticipated behaviour, and innovations that follow one another so quickly no one buys for fear of being left behind. As he sees it, designers are challenged to avoid rosy preconceptions and start instead with these complex, often bewildering realities.

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Introduction

Every year, about 10 million new electronic games find their way into American living rooms. Game software and hardware sell to the tune of $5 billion a year. It is big business. Recently, an industry survey identified the following game platforms, in descending importance, as most likely to be dominant in the coming three to five years:

1. Dedicated 32-bit CD consoles (e.g., Sega Saturn, Sony Playstation)
2. On-line games for networked PCs
3. Off-line games played on PCs
4. 64-bit cartridge (e.g., Nintendo 64)
5. Broadband fibre for TV
6. Handheld (e.g., GameBoy)
7. Wireless/satellite.(1)

Game machines amount to only one kind of digital medium in the living room. But even on its own, the multiplicity of game platforms gives a hint that the convergences of different digitally based technologies remains a mirage.

A decade and a half ago, the American pop futurologist John Naisbitt held that convergence between the computer and telecommunications industries had already taken place.(2) Yes the example of games shows that the consumer of digital media meets convergence only in the same way that, when you are in a blizzard, the snow seems to converge upon you. We all may hope that everything that is done digitally in the home will one day be controlled by a single submissive black box below the stairs. But in the new technology standards vary, and systems are more prone to being incompatible than to matching up. Equally, game users themselves make up a pretty heterogeneous species, just in terms of the platform they prefer.

To design the digital experience successfully, companies must recognize that users of digital media are variegated, protean beasts. Many professionals have already commented on the obvious problems of getting consumers to talk about the digital products and services of the future. These problems become most difficult when surveys are made of that great mass of consumers who do not own a PC. Indeed, as major players in the world of computers and telecommunications try to open up technologies like the Internet to first-time users, major challenges have emerged for the market research industry.(3)

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