The home computer: The making of a consumer electronic

Journal in Humanities, 2017

This article examines the development of the VIC-20 computer system as produced by the American computer company Commodore International during the early 1980s. This analysis demonstrates that thanks to the requirements of the American computer market in the early 1980s, those responsible for its development acted more like a team of collaborative artists rather than a true, by-the-book engineering team. This allowed them to develop the first computer that sold over one million units and created the home computing market. This analysis also demonstrates that this form of development no longer has a place in today's computer development world.

2024

The Industrial Revolution (IR) was the most important single development in human history over the past three centuries and since then; it has continued to shape the contemporary world. From its beginning, it has been a global process that resulted from changes happening in global economic relationships that further redefine them, a process that has persisted until today. Industrialization was the primary force in world history in the 19 th and 20 th centuries, and still powerfully continues to share the 21 st century. During the IR, the industrial design (ID) journey began, and today, designers are being called more often to intervene in large and intricate systems of design. This kind of intervention involves the need to understand users and their relationships with each other and their circumstances. At present, the application of a user-centered design process is considered a form of progress because it enables designers to create better products for users by considering the functionality and stylistic characteristics of the products concerning people's physical and emotional needs. This paper summarizes the history of ID and the consequences of the designer's figure, offering a broad overview spanning from the IR to today.

this paper explores consumers' connections to their domestic objects. Focusing on two particular objects (televisions and vacuum cleaners), the paper reflects upon why consumers desire particular domestic objects and how they assemble, arrange and use things in the home. It reveals how functionality is intimately infused with form, how design informs the consumption of everyday domestic objects and how both function and form can fail, deceive and trick. the mundane movements and moments that comprise homemaking encompass a whole suite of entanglements between object, subject, agency and space. In all sorts of ways this opens up exciting -but also difficult and perplexingpossibilities for consumer agency in the production of home. New kinds of temporality, the rapidity of fashion and design shifts, transformative technologies and new modes of fabrication require new forms of consumption knowledge, competence and skill.

… of the Fifth European Academy of Design …, 2003

In an age very much characterized by information technology there is a growing need understanding the ways in which information technology change and affect human lives. With respects to the great efforts made to integrate information technology by design into social contexts we regard it as necessary and important to take a closer look at the preconditions, problems and significance that information technology creates in the experiences in people's everyday lives. We believe a deeper understanding of the everyday aesthetics of information technology to be vital for the challenge most designer face today, i.e., to design people's everyday experience largely made up by information technology in composition with other designed artifacts that constitutes our everyday environment. In the article we argue that the traditional focus on the functionality, user-friendliness, usability, etc. of the separable individual artifact does not fully capture the richness and influence the information technology artifacts have on people's experience of reality. These approaches all have their benefits but their focus is too narrow. To fully understand the impact of new designs there is a need of capturing the wholeness in how people experience artifacts in their realities. To make the case, we discuss two concepts: the device paradigm and the digital transformation. As a result we present the notion of aesthetic experience as a foundation for a new approach to understand people's lifeworld in relation to technological artifacts. We conclude by arguing that such an approach can in the hands of a designer be of help in dealing with the design of people's everyday lifeworlds.

. This is a preface to a special issue on the history of everyday technology. It includes an introduction to the theory 'Social Construction of Technology' (SCOT) as well as a brief description on the following eleven articles, part of which apply SCOT in their case studies. The volume contains three sections: Gendering Transportation and Communication, Cultivating the Automobile, and Equipping Homes. The list of contents available at: http://lmu-munich.academia.edu/TMyllyntaus/Books From the beginning of the coming academic year the anthology will be used as a textbook at the University of Turku, Finland. The Special Issue of ICON can be ordered by joining ICOHTEC, filling the subscription form and paying the membership fee of the year 2010 (€ 15 - 30). Further information at: http://icohtec.org/about-icohtec-join-us.html

Creativity Research Journal, 2010

The Design Journal, 2017

Since Postmodernism, presenting universal guidelines for aesthetics is highly suspect. However, aesthetics can play a significant role in the acceptance of technology and its success in society, so this paper argues for the generating of specific aesthetic guidelines, based on a general perspective. The goal of the research was to find a method of generating guidelines for the design of a technology to improve the diffusion of that technology in society. Aesthetic theories were generated by comparison of factors with historic precedents (the automobile, the television and the personal computer) The theories were then tested for the design of a social companion robot and a vacuum cleaner robot. From these two design cases it became apparent that the acceptance of both devices can be improved by, respectively, improving their conformity to contemporary design (the social companion robot), or improving their conformity to contemporary philosophy of technology (the vacuum robot).

IEE Review, 1997

2011

This paper considers one of the first personal computers to be marketed to a mainstream American audience in the late 1970s: the Apple II. Lewis Mumford's notion of "ideological and social preparation" is adapted to describe this period as a preparatory phase for the later ubiquity and absorbing quality of our relationship with personal computers. In examining the Apple II's design alongside a key marketing image we can discern that domesticity and gender were crucial points of negotiation during this period. In the late 1970s marketing for Apple the image of idyllic domesticity quickly became a major context for computer promotion, a development that had gendered implications. The example of 1930s streamlining in the design of domestic household appliances is used as a parallel with the Apple II's startling application of a plastic case: the concealing plastic exterior simultaneously simplified and obscured the device, transforming it from a "machine" into a "personal appliance."

1992

This study of the home computer boom is of relevance to wider discussions of consumption, innovation and popular attitudes towards science and technology. Based primarily on empirical work with computer users, it also explores the various media, commercial, academic and political discourses which contributed to the boom. The home computer boom was an event which amounted to more than the sum of individual decisions to purchase and use micros. It is testimony to the influence of visions of a world shaped by technology in the public imagination. Contact with the home computer was mediated by powerful beliefs about the future significance of information technology both inside and, most importantly, outside the home. Many buyers had only vague notions of the nature and capabilities of their micro and how it would fit into their lives-these were issues to be resolved after purchase. Obtaining a machine was just the first stage in 'computer careers' which were often marked by shifting commitments to computing. Any simple ends-orientated view of micro use is inadequate. Much computing, even with advanced and, supposedly, practical hardware and software, has a strong exploratory element. The example of home computing shows how, rather than being an absolute which determines demand, the usefulness of goods is constructed and negotiated in specific social contexts. An issue which preoccupied many was 'finding a use' for the computer. They can be seen investigating and debating the value of various applications. This is not simply resolved at a individual or household level. It is part of a process of innovation-yet to be fully resolved-which takes place across the spheres of production and consumption. Contents Preface iii Part One: Issues and Frameworks 1 Technology and the Future 2 I: Technology, millenia and modernity 2 II: Innovation and culture 21 2 The Millennialism of the Information Technology Revolution 32 3 An Agenda for the Sociology of Consumption 70 Part Two: The Experience of Home Computing 4 Making Sense of Home Computing 113 I: Empirical approaches and issues 113 II: An account of empirical work 137 5 Elements of the British Home Computer Boom 164 6 Responding to Prophecy: Buying into the Home Computer Boom 204 7 Finding a Use for the Home Computer 8 Models and Domains of Computing I: The development of models of computing across the spheres of production and consumption II: Computing, involvement and identity Part Three: Themes and Implications

Over more than 40 years, Jean-Bernard Hebey has assembled one of the world's largest collections of industrial design objects. In this interview with semiotician Bernard Darras, Hebey shares his understanding of design and the way he, as a col- lector, sees his objects.

2006

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 2014

2015

This paper is aimed at academics, students and practitioners in order to discuss ideas that relate to design practice and academic research exploring whether designers should seek to include cultural influences in contemporary mass-produced consumer products aimed at a global mass market. It is often assumed that designers are adept at drawing from a wide range of cultural influences for generating differences leading to novelty and innovation when conceiving new designs. However developments in a range of areas from design education to 3d software and digital printing tools alongside the global strategies of major mass manufacturers has drawn this into question with the production of increasingly ubiquitous physical products. The discussion contrasts a number of diverse experiences from the author’s design and research practice working with highly skilled craftspeople in endangered practices through to global mass consumer products to assemble a picture of how industrial designers in the 21st century deal with cultural influences in their work. It questions the value of incorporating specific cultural influences in mass produced global products and asks whether we should continue the practice of earlier generations of designers in using our skills to enrich the lives of users and enhance product values by introducing expressive cultural influences. This develops the arguments of transnational design activity in relation to the homogenizing and heterogeneous globalising polarities produced through industrial design activity and ultimately suggests a reappraisal of how anthropocentric values are communicated in mass produced products.

1995

The impression is often conveyed in popular writing about electronics and the 'information revolution' that the pace of change is break-neck, and that a torrent of innovations is about to swamp us and force us to change the way we go about our daily lives. Many journalists writing about this technology, for example, become excited by its potential, and assume that because something is technically possible, it will -almost inevitably -happen. The same excitement can affect company management, and lead to speculative deal-making in anticipation of rapid changes in markets. What can happen later, however, is that newspapers find another set of issues, and that, after an initial flurry of excitement, in which firms seek to 'position' themselves in relation to the expected direction of change, it often happens that more realistic views come to the surface, proposed mergers are called off, and expectations of rapidly developing markets are scaled down.