Technology Special
Audio – Consumer Devices
Headphones and Hearables
Audio devices exploring the personal impact radius
Audio world mode – the sleeping giant on the wake: Innovative devices are about shifting hearing into the next interface revolution
Technology is enhancing our senses “magically” enabling them ranscending their immediate, local reach and impact, and nteracting with the furthest point of the world. While our senses stay with us, embodied, we “are” at once everywhere.
Now, hearing is at the brink of being enhanced with paradigmatically innovative all-in-one devices, with hearables. Similar to the ear, what the smartphone is to the eye today.
At this point, industry and consumers are approaching at a new, eventually existentially different scenario.
The Impact – Effect Logic
Miniaturizing technology – maximizing bi-directionally multi usage
Consumers
Hearing, speaking, connecting, recording, silencing off, commanding. A new way of acting and interacting in daily life is becoming possible. Along with this different communication as well cultural standards will evolve.
How will this transformation succeed? Will people accept it? What would they use it for? Is technology ahead of people? Where does the journey go?
Brands
For the industry, hearables are triggering a counter movement to the intense still ongoing market diversification, and especially in the headphones market. Would both approaches co-exist, what will be their mutual impact?
And will a manufacturer stay the same one as before? Will one manufacturer span the whole chain from R&D to the final product in the store? Or will specialization and new business models, such as outsourcing software, managing user data, providing content or a mix of all this dominate? What will be the role of a brand for their customers, what market positioning and what business model will be sustainable?
Usage Scneario:
How and what for will people use it?
Empowerment:
What is the impact of combined capabilities? Such as: sound sheltering, transparency or amplifying, content streaming, communicating with sim translation and voice assisted commanding, e.g. with Siri, Echo or Alexa??
Lifestyle:
How will they impact and re-model the way people live?
Product:
How will current products, e.g. the highly diversified headphone market and their usage habits further develop and coexist alongside with hearables?
Brand:
Technology is also altering the manufacturer’s position. Covering the whole range from R&D to final product, marketing and sales or specialization e.g. on software leasing, content streaming or data collecting.
Culture:
How will they re-model lifestyles, communication and cultural standards?
This field of tension between technology leap and cultural change is an intense field of action and at once of psychological research.
A new cultural Impact logic
With speech recognition and new technology, audio is re-uniting hearing and speaking to their inherent reciprocal communication mode. Separate functionalities grow together to an in-ear digital personal assistant customized to an individual ear print.
Enabling, enhancing our senses bi-directionally to do both, “passively” receive and “actively” perform, to connect, receive, send and command in an increasingly 3D technology mode.
While our senses stay with us, embodied, we “are” at once everywhere.
Product Perceptions
Bose Sleepbuds – Combining different benefit areas of perceiving ‘noise’
Our Services
Within this paradigm shifting scenario we can support industries exploring, assessing and thinking through the vital and dramatic changes ahead:
Our research perspective here is to understand, how all this actually works in daily life.
Psychology of product usage
UI: How is the actual usage experience, comfort, ease of use, personalization? How does it feel to use them? Experiences in action, on location. What are reactions of others involved?
Usage needs and motifs
Will people include them into their life habits? Can they use it and for what? Is it the thing the always wanted? Are they ready for it? How do they make sense? What do they entail? Business, private and medical usage areas.
Segmentation of target groups
Who, when, where currently has a definnite use? How are the early buyers? Who will be next to integrate hearable into their life? Are there cultural differences?
Impact framing
How does it change the daily life, communication and cultural standards we share? Lifestyle Impact chains. Cultural and societal re-coding impact.
Style and Branding
How can a manufcaturer be a brand in the future? Is style “life”-style or a manufacturer driven matrix of a “design for living”?
Brand Analysis
The perception, role and loyalty to a brand. New business models from merged functionalities or traditional manufacturer position? Positioning among competitive field. Impact of national and international audience.
Reading the “trigonometry” between data, postings and analog life, their “osmotics” in terms of their decision-making, regarding products, brands and other issues
