STATISTICS THAT MAKE DREAMS COME TRUE
The rule ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ has probably never been so applicable as it is nowadays. The world of technological progress can be attributed to two groups. The first one are classical inventors, who hide in laboratories, bend over formulas and microscopes, and wait for a miracle to happen and they finally discover something. Such a miracle happens relatively often. Shortly afterwards, however, a disturbing question appears: what to do with this? The other group of inventors consists of people who, above all, look for problems, social demands or dreams and only then set to solve these problems. Representatives of the first group may well be awarded a Nobel Prize, the other make millions of dollars on patents and ready-made products. The first group look deep into the heart of the universe for anything and nothing in particular while the latter are commissioned to work by conscious consumers.
Great expectations
Some two years ago a gossip spread on the Internet that Apple, the company famous for doing everything better than others, is designing a mobile phone. Gossips related to Apple always mean excitement in the electronic world since the great majority of Apple’s products are beautiful objects that may seem just counterparts to other products already on the market but that are always revolutionary and set the trend for the producers from all over the world. What’s more, the company carefully guards its secretes. When the Apple-gossip appeared, the company didn’t probably even have the design unit that were to create what the world had already named iPhone. This product, however, started to take shape in the heads of the fortunetelling Internet users. The material they used for their magic were: existing Apple products (especially the widely known iPod), shortcomings of the competitive products and knowledge of emerging technological possibilities powered by the conscientiously applied and easy as falling off a log motto of development: more and cheaper.
And so hundreds of the Internet users started to pour the water of their dreams on the mills of the discussion forums. Gradually, a clear picture emerged from this liquid magma. Successive months were bringing more and more gossips and iPhone was becoming more and more concrete. Yet all this happened not in designers’ offices but solely in the heads and on the computers of the potential clients. At the beginning of 2006 one could already find fake visualizations of the future gadget, some of them weak, others, in the video format, enchantingly probable. 6 months later everybody was sure Apple is going to make that phone but nobody had seen it yet. The world of computer gossip was boiling. Various portals published true and false information about the economic side of the enterprise or its selected technical features. Finally, on a specially arranged conference being a personal show of the company’s chairman Steve Jobs, Apple presented a few new revolutionary products, including iPhone. The long waiting came almost to an end. Almost, because for the first time Apple presented a product which was not to be available on the market for some time, only the predicted date of its release was given. A lot of speculation were done away with and their place was taken by a new flood of discussions. Everybody even slightly interested in technological novelties started to comment on the product, even though only few had the chance to see it with their own eyes (among whom only about a dozen people were granted the privilege of holding this embodied dream in their hands).
Has iPhone lived up to the expectations? Yes, and even more than that. For many it was a revolutionary product. There was also a considerable group of the disappointed. The truth is not somewhere in between but underneath all that gossiping and arguing. iPhone is a product up to the demands set by the troops of the Internets users craving for novelties and possibilities available for the fast-developing industry. iPhone is one of the products designed according to a new method of self-creating.
Dreams processing
In the process of designing, the new product doesn’t come from nowhere but it is the outcome of the popular demands for new aesthetics, functionality and the so-called wow factor. Once released controlled and free gossip may supply its sender with an enormous amount of information. It’s a self-organising base for a socio-marketing research. Having released a gossip one is to observe what happens. If the idea is catchy, secret preparatory research work will start already at the stage of the interest in the problem to be solved, not necessarily at the stage of a particular product. The vox populi is carefully listened to since those are the people who will spend their hard-earned money on the new item. A team of analysts gather this information and gossip floating for a long time on the surface of the electronic discourse. Then they forward the results of their research to the designers’ team, who clothe these proposals with their own ideas, filter them through the actual and potential technical possibilities and mould the product at consumers’ bidding. Eventually, when the current of speculations coincide with the course of laboratory work, the release of the product to the market is being thought of. Under advantageous economic conditions, the decision is taken to reveal plans or the date of the new toy’s premiere. Recently, Apple company added one more stage to the process, a stage that can be described as public refining of the product. The product itself had been announced 6 months before it was released, with minimal information available which allowed Apple to get feedback based on speculations, that is also on expectations, of the prospective users. On the basis of this feedback, it was possible to design new functions and resign from those that would bring the product down.
Fortunetelling effect
In the process of product design, members of the Internet community interested in a particular field become fortune-tellers, whose prophecies get fulfilled. It goes without saying, that most of their guesses are just their imagination yet among them there is a bunch of true professionals whose opinions affect share prices of many companies. Whichever perspective is adopted, a product is created that occupies the optimal position between the demands of the individuals and of the company and everybody feels like the winning party. Obviously, every more aware modern fortune-teller remains a bit disappointed since he cannot feel the surprise of the kind ‘well, I have to say I was wrong’ or cannot spot the drawbacks of the product which was meant to satisfy everybody, including the producer, who can’t agree to much in order not lose the control over the product, patent and the direction of the company’s development. It is a kind of a blind open-source in which a great majority of the working do not know what they work on or even that they work at all, and, on top of that, that they are going to produce something.
All this sounds like some devilish and inhuman way of making money on limitless public resources. That’s not the whole truth. In fact, the method is not cost-free, it demands a lot of effort and I don’t think that anybody would use it in its pure form. It’s very time consuming and produces a great deal of waste, including patent-waste, which, being public documents, reveal the inside of company’s research work, very often damaging its reputation despite being valuable itself. During the designing process nothing is known for sure, there is always a possibility that one element will turn out to be disastrous for the success of the whole project. This can happen to iPhone because after the initial rapture many Internet users started to have doubts whether it was really the discovery of a new continent if Apple presented something that basically everybody knows already with only few fountains and without many attractions that that rivals offer today.
Product
In this way a new product is created similar to the favourite song of the engineer Mamoń, that is something everybody has already heard but now in an updated version. A brilliant idea mentioned by a user gets lost in the crowd of many others and because it is new and extravagant it doesn’t find as many supporters as the more conventional ones. Thus, the chances for a truly revolutionary product are wasted. It must be stressed that the method mentioned in this article is quite widely applied and has many times achieved spectacular success, especially when it was combined with traditional research methods. Let’s take the example of another telephone. Motorola designed a special product for the people from countries of different cultures than the European and American ones. Motophone was designed on the basis of research conducted in India by a numerous team of specialists. People who haven’t got a telephone yet were asked what they think it should be like to suit their purposes best. On the basis of countless conversations with the natives about their needs as well as on the basis of the information gathered from the sellers, the Internet and other unusual sources a telephone was designed that really satisfies the needs of its potential users. The product is surprising to such extend that the only Europeans who would feel tempted to buy it are probably those enchanted by its designing process. It costs 19$, is equipped with a monochromatic screen so small that one word barely fits in, battery-operated without recharging for hundreds of hours and its ringtone is so loud that you will hear it even during a wedding reception (it was deemed a necessary feature of a ’telephone of the future’ by the majority of the interviewed). Most advanced technologies were used, it was hard to put them together but, eventually, the company managed to create something that will serve people for whom it was designed.
In the two cases there is ‘future’ that was first seen by somebody. At that point this somebody didn’t know whether this ‘future’ has chances to be made real or whether it would be of any use to anyone. It is we who play the role of this ‘somebody’ whenever we discuss the future matters that still remain secret. Contrary to Oedipus, the one who learns this fortune-telling will implement it for the benefit of others. Thus the fore-told future is a designed future since the telling, if sufficiently supported by faith, sooner or later comes true. If there is not enough faith then don’t worry, nobody would remember that something was told at all.
Jacek Sosnowski
Translated by Anna Skrajna
The article comes from the quaterly “(op.cit.,)” issue no. 1 (34) 2007