The Future of Design: IDEO's way

Title: The Power of Design
Source: Business Week (May 17, 2004)
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_20/b3883001_mz001.htm

This article is about the future of one of the most famous design firms, IDEO. Perhaps this article tells us the future of industrial design works. However, ironically, here is no real product design development case. Why? Where is a product design disappeared?
I think design (especially industrial or product design) is in a transitional period to adapt its competitive power to a new environment world which is called as information society. We can easily find out that IDEO’s design works are very different compared to traditional design service. In other view of point, IDEO’s design service is similar to business consulting firms.
What can designers who received a traditional design education do in this kind of company, such as IEDO? And what should we study in school? What is real competitive power of design or designer? How much important the capability of styling is? What or how is relationship between design and innovation? Surely, I think there are several design issues in this article.

What is digital culture focused design?

Korean electronices companies have been interested in the word of "digital" since about 1999. There were many design development projects to define " the digital product". Of course I participated in several projects at that time. However I don't always know what is digital design. Above is one of the results of inhouse competition about digital design.
At that time most product designers often used bule lighting clor for their design work. Why do most people consider digital color as blue?

Even though this is some different story, I want to define design as below.

You can know only as much as you love.
You can see only as much as you know.
You can feel only as much as you see.
You can design only as much as you feel.

Internet Cafe in Korea

Internet cafe is called as "PC Bang" in Korea. "Bang" means a room.
PC Bang began in the mid 1990s. Even though it had some business fluctuation, now there are up to 22,000 PC Bangs in Korea.

To compete with home Internet service, (most Korean people use Internet at their home) PC Bangs have developed not only high quality internet service but also interior design continuously. The speed of Internet line of PC Bang is very faster than home Internet. And PC Bang has many kind of software and a variety of devices, such as online games, office programs, pc camera, printer and scanner.
Usually customers use Internet and game for a fee of about $1 an hour.

I think PC Bang is a good example that we can understand Internet culture because it is one of the various experments about Internet evolution.
In Korea, PC Bang is one of many interfaces between cyber and real world.