By Patrick Avenell at IFA in Berlin
“It’s like a Champions League night” exclaimed Siemens CEO Roland Hagenbucher when introducing the first press conference at 2013. Much like technology is slowly infiltrating its way into football, appliance smarts is the major focus for Siemens.
Although we’ve had the opportunity to purchase a refrigerator with internet connectivity since LG’s ill-fated 2000 launch, the connected appliances category has seen more false starts than saleable releases over the intervening years.
In recognising this delay, Hagenbucher said connectivity “will no longer be a vision but actually released to the market”.
The fountainhead for this strategy is a report Siemens commissioned from the Future Institute of Frankfurt.
The key findings from this survey into the changing nature of households were that society is moving to even greater urbanisation, people are looking for individuality, there are more people living in single households and there is great apartment living.
“Society is changing and our lifestyles are changing against this backdrop,” Hagenbucher said. “We want to find out how people imagine their homes in the future, given these changes. We want to offer innovative solutions for people’s households based on this change.”
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The motif repeated throughout Siemens’ launch was that this technology needed to be intuitive. Smart appliances must adapt to the user, not the other way round, said Hagenbucher, and cooking appliances must suit the user’s lifestyle.
“People want their homes to be a safe haven to recharge their batteries. We manage our complex lives at home and want to use the home to spend time with friends and family. We must come to terms with the home being the centre of work life balance.
To demonstrate his point, Hagenbucher said Siemens’ research showed that people now “sleep in the living room, work in the bedroom and live in the kitchen”, and that people are taking a more “flexible approach to life”.
The scene itself at Siemens’ stand served as evidence: Hagenbucher gave his presentation off an iPad in front of a hall of journalists working off notebook PCs, tablets and smartphones — we are more and more used to using intuitive and simple technology that makes our lives easier and adapts to us.
Hagenbucher continually referenced the mostly failed attempts to integrate connectivity to a home appliance network. The inference was that these ‘solutions’ put technology at the fore and asked the user to adapt to it. This is an errant path, he said.
“The technology must result in a higher quality of life,” Hagenbucher said, before coining a new portmanteau to denote the conflation of ease-of-use and smart functionality:
“We call this ‘simplexity’,” he said. “This is the design creed that we derived from our futurism study. Handling these trends must be as simple as possible.
“The interface between men and machine will have to be redesigned in a radical new way. The intelligent control and connectivity of households will be part of Smart home solutions. It will make life easier. The connected home is no longer a vision, it is a reality.”