Simplicity Event 2007 London Background information

The Philips Simplicity Event 2007 is the third such event produced by Philips. The concepts showcased here today demonstrate a commitment to deliver solutions to the anticipated needs of tomorrow’s society. 

The 2007 Philips simplicity-led design concepts are focused on caring for people’s wellbeing both in healthcare and lifestyle. This theme emerged from two key insights identified across the healthcare and lifestyle industries:

Firstly, governments can no longer cope with the growing demand for healthcare. Consequently, informal caregivers such as adult children, parents, friends, neighbors and self-help communities are beginning to assume the importance they had before governments began taking on responsibility for healthcare. The focus will therefore shift from care that is centered on problems and crises, towards lifestyle-driven and long term care.

Secondly, lifestyle hospitality will increasingly include health and wellbeing. It will not be enough for tomorrow’s hospitality industry to provide facilities for relaxation and entertainment. They will also need to offer environments and experiences that support a healthy lifestyle.

To understand the total relationship between caregivers and receivers it is necessary to analyze the total ‘care cycle’. In certain healthcare situations the cycle would run from the first emergency reaction to post clinical support. In the case of childbirth, the cycle would go from planning for a baby to post delivery support. And in the hospitality industry, the cycle would run from selecting and booking a hotel room to leaving the hotel at the end of the stay.

The Simplicity Event 2007 presents interactive concepts in which design and innovation is increasingly important. The intelligence in the system, however, remains that of the people involved in the experience. Philips refers to such concepts as ‘ambient experiences’ rather than ‘ambient intelligence,’ because they are designed to empower, rather than overpower professional staff, enabling them to offer more service-oriented care experience across both the healthcare and hospitality domains.

Often a concept is an idea that goes no further than a computer screen or a piece of paper. It has no ‘life’. It cannot be touched or tested, listened to or watched. That is why the Philips Simplicity Event stages concept-demonstrations that enable people to actually experience the ideas. It is the best means of clearly communicating the context and benefits of a concept, and allowing an audience to react. Philips considers it essential to the development of simplicity-led design.

Concepts are brought to life through the acting out of real-life scenarios. Professional actors play the roles of the personas constructed and used during the creative process, and play out key moments of interaction with the design concepts while presenters introduce the topic and comment on the scenario so that the audience has a full understanding of the situation. Audience volunteers are then invited to try out the experience themselves. Their feedback will be used to help make improvements and perhaps move the concepts toward real products in the next three to five years.

Philips Simplicity Event 2007 showcases many recently available Philips products that exemplify simplicity. These products are displayed in a retail environment. This year’s highlights include:

• Living Colors
• One Star is Born as produced by citizen M
• Aurea
• AmbiSound
• Motiva
• QCPR
• Ambiscene Lighting
• LED Park Benches

Improving people’s quality of life requires both a detailed understanding of a complex world and the ability to reasonably predict what that world might look like in the future.

To reach such an understanding, Philips conducts ‘foresight’ research, trends research, and people research. The results are compiled into reports used to build ‘personas’ – aggregated representations of genuine individuals – that help Philips design concepts for real people.

‘Foresight’ research delivers strategic insights into the global and regional socio-cultural changes that might change future values, needs, lifestyles and behaviors.

Trends research provides global and regional information about the most important cultural trends over the next two to three years. This enables Philips to anticipate themes and products that are likely to affect customers, the competition and the industry. They also use the trends as a source of inspiration when observing conceptual, experiential and aesthetic qualities of their concepts and ideas.

People research investigates not just the needs and personal motivations of people in different geographical regions, but also how they see their futures and what they perceive to be a ‘good’ quality of life.

Following the completion of the insight research, Philips developed as many as 500 ideas that were then refined and short listed to approximately 20 scenarios, which were further reduced to three care themes – Care for Patients, Care for Families, Care for Guests.

Sense and simplicity is the focus of everything that Philips does, and the philosophy around which the Philips design process is focused. This applies whether the concept is designed to reduce the effort necessary to operate advanced products or systems, or whether it is intended to enrich the experience associated with more basic functionalities.

The Philips simplicity-led design approach comprises three major steps:

1. Philips researches people and future trends and then devises life scenarios that lead to meaningful innovations that have the potential to improve the quality of people’s lives.
2. Philips extracts from the above scenarios what the solution should and should not do, and how simple and pleasurable the interfaces should be, leading to new forms of interaction between people and products or environments.
3. Philips strives for a simple and iconic ‘look and feel’ to ensure a positive response when people first encounter the solution. This greatly influences initial perception and expectations.

‘Ambient Healing Space’
In circumstances where people’s wellbeing is partly in the hands of another person or organization, the challenge is two-fold. It lies in creating meaningful innovations that directly contribute to the quality of the end-consumer’s health and happiness while at the same time providing professional  ( and non-professional) caregivers with the tools to enable them to enhance the end-consumer’s wellbeing.

Being a professional caregiver requires excellence in performance, reliability and consistency, and in providing protection and safety. But ‘taking care’ of someone also means looking after their well-being, and that involves tact, attention, understanding, respect, and compassion. Philips believes that the rational side of care cannot be addressed without also addressing the emotional side.

Knowledgeable customers and an aging population expect their providers to deliver more and better services. And they want comfort, reassurance and peace of mind. Today’s healthcare facilities are designed not only to support and facilitate cutting-edge medicine, technology, patient safety, and quality patient care, but also to offer patients, families and caregivers a socially supportive therapeutic environment. This means that the environment in which a patient receives care affects not just clinical outcomes, but satisfaction levels among both patients and medical staff.

The ‘Ambient Healing Space’ explores ways to personalize hospital stays to make the experience more welcoming and more comfortable for patients, while providing healthcare professionals with a uniquely transparent, resource-rich environment in which to care for their patients. 

‘Celebrating Pregnancy’
From conception to the moment of childbirth and beyond, bringing a child into the world is both a joy and a challenge. But while medical advances have made the experience safer than ever before, mothers and fathers are often treated like patients with a disease instead of parents-to-be. In today’s society, many families experience pregnancy and childbirth as a techno-medical event fraught with the possibility of tragedy; tragedy averted in maternity hospitals with back-up facilities and resources enabling constant, high-level care during pregnancy, labor and beyond. Doctors are of the opinion that maternity wards are by far the best option in terms of support and emergency care, so while they increasingly view home births as safe, the preference is still for women to give birth in the carefully monitored environment of a hospital. Over the past few decades, medical practice has taken pregnancy and childbirth away from its origins as a natural, physiological event and turned it into to a highly complex medical procedure.

Studies show that increasing the percentage of women receiving prenatal care reduces the likelihood of complications during pregnancy and childbirth, thus improving birth outcomes and lowering healthcare costs. Another important part of the care cycle is the postnatal follow-up, providing information on everything from breastfeeding to child development.

There is increasing demand for a prenatal/childbirth space that combines a woman’s need for one-to-one professional consultation with a people-centered approach to care. This is a space that builds confidence and psychological well-being; where mothers are in control and where physicians and obstetricians intervene only where strictly necessary to ensure a gentle transition from womb to outside world.

It’s time for all-around care, combining clinical efficiency with a warmer, more personal approach that puts parents back where they belong, at the heart of the matter. ‘Celebrating Pregnancy’ explores ways to improve the pregnancy experience for parents-to-be, making it more informative, moving and enjoyable and, from a clinical point of view, warmer and more service-oriented.

‘Daylight’
The needs and priorities of hotel guests have changed radically over the past few years leading to a demand for the hospitality industry to take a more flexible and customer-driven approach. Today’s guests require more than just a quiet, spacious room featuring high standards of comfort and service. Hotels must provide a range of facilities that allow guests to combine business with pleasure.

When traveling across several time zones, the body clock goes out of sync. This results in jetlag, with symptoms such as loss of appetite, headaches, fatigue, irregular sleep patterns and mild depression. In addition, more than one in three adults indicates they rarely sleep well when traveling. A breakthrough in jetlag prevention occurred when researchers at Chicago’s Northwestern University discovered a third light receptor in the retina that is directly connected to the body clock and which may influence mood and performance. This receptor was found to be more receptive to light at the blue end of the spectrum. By following a carefully timed program of alternating light and darkness therapy at precisely the times the body clock is most responsive, people are able to adjust more quickly to new time zones, often within only one or two days. 

‘Daylight’ explores natural, rewarding ways for hotel guests to experience light and ambience in the comfort of their rooms, while giving hotel staff new opportunities to ensure the health and happiness of their guests.

The Philips Simplicity Event is located at London’s Earls Court 2 exhibition centre from 23-25 October 2007.