industrial designer: Who is gonna do a PowerPoint presentation ? user interface: Think we all industrial designer: You will as well ? user interface: Huh . I just wanna 'cause basically I can't re I've really crap at remembering everyone's name so I just wanna rather than going  Miss Marketing and Miss this and Miss that wanted to know your names again . industrial designer: Okay I'm project manager: just gonna leave this up here 'cause I'll you know . And you're s r R_E_I_S_S_ marketing: I am Reissa .  this is gonna go a lot better than the last meeting , basically , industrial designer: user interface: project manager:  'cause I know what I'm supposed to be doing now . industrial designer: marketing: project manager: I am your Project Manager , and ,  yeah , I'm just here to industrial designer: project manager: sort of liaise between the three of you and get things going , get people talking and and I'm gonna be making notes and sending them off to the powers that be and stuff basically .  right , this for the purposes of this meeting what this meeting is all about is  I'm gonna have some presentations from all three of you , what you've been working on for the last wee while , when you haven't been getting hit with spam on your computers and and , you know , filling out silly questionnaires and things . We'll we'll  talk about what we actually need as a final coming together of it all .  and then we'll , yeah , we'll sort of conclude anything else comes up at the end of it . industrial designer: How long is the meeting ? project manager: This meeting it's not very long . So I want each of your presentations to not be too long , five five minutes , something like that . project manager:  if you haven't done a PowerPoint thingy , it doesn't matter , it it just it just says that you it's that's just one particular medium . If you haven't had time to prepare one , you can draw stuff on the noteboard , you can talk to us , you can you know however you want to do your little presentation , basically , you can . project manager: are you  b are you joining in with this meeting here marketing: I  yeah , yeah . project manager: or are y or are y or are you are you just are you just  doing some Internet shopping there ? user interface: Think she's finishing up her presentation . Alright , let's have  well , we all know that it's it's a remote control that we're gonna be dealing with . project manager: I think the first thing we should look at is  probably the  what it is that it is actually supposed to be . project manager: You don't have to worry about screwing it in just industrial designer: Are we getting i Really ? project manager: there you go . marketing: industrial designer: So the working design , I've got a very quick presentation on this , so  I've oh no , you can't see a thing . So  the idea is that we've got the energy source  , which in our case will pr , oh well okay , never mind . So  I think maybe  two batteries , I dunno what they're called six , or something like that . industrial designer:  and then  then on the  remote control itself will have  the sender for the signal , which could be  an infra-red signal ,  which will be sent by an electronic chip . industrial designer: And  the sender will send to the telly itself an infra-red signal to tell it to switch on or switch channels . industrial designer: Sorry the presentation wasn't very  clear but project manager: I prefer the pe I prefer the human touch personally . industrial designer: should I erase this or project manager: Do you wanna just give us a moment , I just wanna copy this down . project manager:  I dunno if you guys have got any questions for Catherine on any of this ? industrial designer: Fine . Or suggestions ? marketing: Is a battery like the only way of industrial designer: Well , it's just , you don't want it plugged in really , s user interface: Yeah , alternate energy source , like win wind power or project manager: Yeah , you blow on it and i industrial designer: In indoors . marketing: No I meant like industrial designer: marketing: No 'cause like cha 'cause always changing   batteries can get like annoying . industrial designer: marketing: The battery's down and maybe , I dunno , solar charged ? industrial designer: I dunno , swi I th I th I think changing your batteries once every six months is not really a pain , but project manager: Yeah , it's worked for the last fifty years you know . user interface: One question I have , and I don't know how much control we have over this is  , as far as the infra-red signal , do we have control over , you know , how far away you can be from the receiving unit , the the T_V_ , and still have it be operational ?  , maybe we want one with a strong signal stream . project manager: It's never gonna be more than it's never gonna be , you kno unless you've got a T_V_ the size of a football pitch , it's not doesn't have to go that far , user interface:  industrial designer: Well , the thing is  you you don't project manager: does it ? Doesn't have to go through a wall , because you're not gonna be looking through a wall . marketing: Yeah , but if like you're on the phone in the other room and you need turn television off or something and you don't really want to go into the put the telephone down , and go into the other room . industrial designer: Well , we can make the the signal strong enough to go through walls if if you fancy it . I didn't think about that but marketing: How about Bluetooth ? Instead of using infra-red , use Bluetooth . industrial designer: Why not ? I just think that it's it's gonna cost more marketing: Isn't that a better signal ? project manager: Yeah , yeah I d it sounds like you you w don't wanna overcomplicate things . industrial designer: and I'm I'm not sure it's you're gonna use it . industrial designer: It's a fancy idea  it's quite nice , but then I don't th I dunno , either you if you wanna watch the telly you're in the room , project manager: Yeah , exactly . industrial designer: you are gonna project manager: Basically , we're we're desi we're designing and marketing a television remote control unit . industrial designer: But project manager: We're not w w w w designing something that you can plug in a headset to and and you know connect to your laptop computer and stuff . industrial designer: Oh , we can we can keep the idea if you i We can see at a later stage , maybe , I don't marketing: 'S just an idea . industrial designer: Do you need the border ? user interface:  I'm just gonna use the PowerPoint  . user interface: Yeah , and basically  , as far as methods , I was I was looking looking at looking at  already existing remotes , trying to find some inspiration from designs that are already out there . Thinking of what we can retain , what we can do away with ,  what we what we can perfect a little bit as far as design  . we don't want to do something that's too radical of a change , I guess ,  people want a remote that's familiar , that has their favourite functionalities  and and does the basics , but project manager:  yeah . user interface:  so we can improve what's out there and maintain that , the basic functionality that people want .  so things that seem like absolute must-haves  would be a volume control ,  so up-down keys for that ,  channel keys up-down , but then also a numerical key pad so that they can just key directly to the channel that they want , rather than doing up-down , and  a mute button .  one thing that I didn't include here , that I forgot that we talked about last time , was doing  some sort of lock  function . And so in the research that I was doing there's basically two types of remotes , ones that are engineering centred and ones that are more user centred , which I don't know if I can access the web page from here , but I can show you  . So this is a engineer centred one , so you see it's rather busy , but it also lets you play your movie , stop your movie , fast-forward , all this ,  freeze frame .  it's it's easier to g just glance at this and see what's possible to do , project manager: Yeah . user interface: And I judging from what what we all talked about during our last meeting I kind of gathered that that's what we were going after ,  or the direction we were going in at least . So , the engineering centred ones  provide a lot of functionality , but it can be a little bit overwhelming , so the user centred ones just focus on ease of use .  and this sort of overlaps with what the marketing person  , Reissa , marketing: user interface: because  we we need to find out what what people want before we make firm decisions on this . This w  research that you've been doing looki looking at other , you know , existing units stuff .  have you found that anyone else has do has looked into the locking function or user interface: No that that that seemed like a novel idea as f as far as I know . I dunno , what  do you guys have a a yea or nay on that a feeling about whether that's really necessary ? project manager:  I would say it's If it's simple to do , which I think it probably should be , user interface: Yeah . project manager: even if it's a physical , you know , a f a like a f a physical switch or a physical cover for the remote , even something like that ,  then yes , user interface: project manager: it's like , you know , like s you said earlier on ab ab ab a flip thing , something like that , user interface: Right .  I've had word down from head office that something that we should be centred well , something we should take into account is  we've gotta keep the corporate image within this remote control unit . project manager: You know , the the company it's it's , from what I can see from our other products , are yellow with blue writing on them . project manager: So it's kinda gotta look it's gotta look new and s you know something fashionable . If if remote control well , if telephones can be fashionable , then maybe remote control units can be . user interface: Well yeah these , I think , we can so we talked about the layout in my presentation and what I didn't mention yet really is is the sort of like the ergonomic design . Because we need user interface: I t I think we can make big improvements over these two that you see here ,  . industrial designer: user interface: everything is going t ergonomic , you know , there's you know mice for your computers that are very ergonomic and keyboards and that could be one of our niches p sort of   in the market , I guess . user interface: Yeah , then you just have to do function F_ eight and it should come up . Well , for our marketing report  we observed remote control users in a usability lab , and also gave so this is research and we also gave participants  questionnaires to fill out .  total number of people tested were a hundred just so you know , so that hundred people were tested and these were the findings .  eighty f eighty per cent of them would spend more money if the rem remote control looked really cool and fancy . So , they don't like like the way they operate it doesn't like match how people behave .  per cent of the users say that they only use ten per cent of the buttons on a remote , so probably if you have like one , two , three , four , five , the whole up to z ten , they probably don't use those , they only use the up and down channel . project manager: You are a child of technology , aren't you ? marketing:  so yeah  I was thinking something easy to use , especially for older people . And it's easy to find , so I don't know whether maybe and also we asked them whether they wanted whether they'd be interested in  voice activating . marketing:  so basically the majority except for the forty five to fifty five year olds for some reason didn't want a voice activated one . And neither did the older generation , but the younger generation who we are catering for , like who have most of the money nowadays , do want a voice act speech recognition in a remote . industrial designer: project manager:  but do the younger generation have the money ? They they don't . project manager: It's older generation , they're the ones that have gone out and marketing: Well the twenty five to thirty five year old , and thirty five , and the thirty five to forty five , forty five point seven per cent say no , so project manager: People people from the age of thirty f there's a big drop off there . marketing: project manager: For people up to the age of thirty five , you're kinda saying , yeah , they want it .  but no they're not sort of most people that have the money are people from the age of thirty five to fifty five , user interface: Yeah , that would be my guess as well . marketing: So they don't project manager:  d and tha marketing: Well project manager: and that's a that's quite a minority there , so yeah , it's not even like fifty fifty that's th thirty five per cent . user interface: What about just from the the prospective of our manufacturing cost ?  if if it's twelve fifty per unit . marketing:  also with  with buttons , a thing called R_S_I_ , so wrist sense user interface: Repetitive strain  rep repetitive strain injury marketing: Huh ? user interface: or like from doing marketing: Yeah , repetitive strains injury , so they don't I think people who watch T_V_ maybe too often , keep changing channel hurts their wrist . project manager: So y so it's so it's so you got user interface: project manager: so that's something we should have a look into then i when desi when designing the ergonomics of marketing: Yeah user interface:  . project manager: see have a look if  there's any w any medical background we can find out about this . industrial designer: Maybe it could be , instead of pressing button it could be just touching a marketing: Yeah . project manager: Let's jus marketing: Maybe project manager: we just want need to cover our arses so that people aren't gonna sue us in ten years' time , say your remote control gave me repetitive strain injury . project manager: I'll see if I can get see if I can get hold of them for the next meeting . I think we can do some really in in that department , the the ergonomic department , we can make some some really good improvements . Maybe th the buttons not so high up so you don't have to press so much , user interface:  .  okay , so we've basically we've decide we've d we've decided that it's gonna be , you know  , we're going for a basic television remote . project manager: Now going back to the  industrial design of it , you know , we were looking at whether to use maybe infra-red or Bluetooth . I think , we should just go with the simplest option on everything ,  and that would be infra-red , energy source , that would be batteries .  mean we we can look into using the s , you know , the little tiny weeny batteries , all like special long-lasting batteries . But a in there's no I don't think there's any point in making a remote control unit that's gonna last for fifty years , because technology will have changed and , you know , we won't have televisions in ten years' time . user interface: Yeah , it seems like we're all on the pretty much on the same page . Have you been ge has have any of you lot been getting loads of crap spam on your computers ? user interface: Oh it's probably just you , 'cause you're the project manager . Do oh have you guys found out if we can if we can e-mail stuff to each other ? marketing: Yeah , you can . I industrial designer: Well , in the project announcement , you've got the addresses , I think . marketing: I think he's participant one , aren't you ? industrial designer: So Project Manager , it's participant one at A_M_I_ . project manager: Can you all d e-mail me your e-mail addresses ? marketing: project manager: . industrial designer: You have them i you have them , user interface: Well it's just w it's just it's just par participant one , participant two . project manager: Send me , yeah industrial designer: You want to have friends , don't you ? project manager: yeah , okay . user interface: So are we headed towards like a b a big yellow and black remote as far as maybe that's our next meeting that we discuss that . project manager: Is it yellow and black or is it yellow and blue ? I I kind of thought it was blue writing on a yellow background , but I might be just going a bit user interface: Well , it's like white on i white and blue on a black background with white with yellow borders . project manager: Well , maybe you can come up with a few with a couple of different ideas ? industrial designer: It wouldn't be user interface:  . marketing: Can't we have different colours in the remotes , so somebody can choose different col project manager: Well , see the thing is is we've gotta keep the company image . project manager: It's gotta say people have gotta look at this remote control and instantly recognise that it's a Real Reaction i product . marketing: But if it's a R_R_ , it would be Real Reaction , project manager: There's loads of companies that called R_R_ . project manager: This is slog but this is the slogan , this is the the the the type . user interface: And this is something that came on down from from the higher ups , project manager: Yeah . project manager: Not necessarily even if i it just has to ye but you have to look at the product and instantly know that it's one of our products industrial designer: Well you could project manager: as opposed to a Sony product or a , you know , a Panasonic product . project manager: It's got to so maybe , so you can have a look at our our other products and see if they all follow a s similar vein , perhaps . industrial designer: It could come But it could come in different colours and have the R_R_ colours just somewhere project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: like just around the lock button could be the R_R_ logo or colours and project manager: Yeah . project manager: If we've if we've finished at five minutes before the meeting's supposed to finish , then that means we get an extra five minutes for lunch . I just have to there's a few little bits and pieces I have to write down , but Take your headsets off , kick back , smoke 'em if you got 'em