Since a long time, science knows that placebo is over 50% of the effect of medicines and drugs, including coffee. Still most products in this area rely on chemical performance.

This is my first example of how many product areas develop: initially focus on physical performance, then presentation and handling and after that experience and meaning. It all goes hand in hand with the established marketing and motivation theories*.

Typical modernistic medicine (above). Tasteful and practical packaging. This is what I mean by something that just “is”. A pill is a pill. The whole value is considered to be hidden in the substance. Your doctor will tell you what medicine to use. Cause-and-effect proven by science. Some branding effect in the well known name. But any additions of pictures, promises or other experience elements would actually be considered immoral, even if they might enhance the medical effect.

Then, of course, there is fair amount of credibility in this dry and simplistic presentation. But is it an active design choise, based on what gives the best experience and effect? I don’t think so.

French day and night pills for colds (above). User oriented presentation makes the use easier. Choise of colours and materials make the white pills look better. The presentation is more elegant and “selling”. But the pill is still a pill.

“Hollywood.” American cold medicine full of promises and experience. Large colourful box, large colourful capsules. Focus on the user experience and sense of value.

In Sweden we just recently dropped the monopoly of pharmacies. Soon we will be able to buy some medicines in supermarkets. Medicine will be increasingly treated as consumer products when people are to make their own choises off the shelf.

Is “Hollywood” medicine the next step? Or rather experience oriented, placebo-enhancing, simple to use and understand, value-added medicine?

*) Maslow, Herzberg, Peters/Waterman jr, Mayo, Levitt, Ries, Trout, Negroponte and most others…

Suddenly it struck me that while many of us have been amazed by the creative and innovative opportunities provided by Internet and the web, our world has changed in so many other ways. Internet is an important part in this change, an accelerator even, but not the only one. Everything is different, or will be. The shift from modernism and industrialism to postmodernism and postindustrialism is all around us and touches most human expressions. I see this change clearly, but I don’t hear anyone discussing it. Maybe this change has been shadowed by the currently functionalistic furniture fashion and the Internet hype. Many homes today have a functionalistic look but that is not because their inhabitants embrace the original ideas. They appreciate the expressions of the industrial age for other reasons.

In the postmodern and postindustrial society truth is dead. Nothing just “is”. Everything tells a story, or will tell a story. Everything stands for something else. Or will. Features, properties, values and expressions interact in new ways. You cannot isolate single aspects but you need to take several perspectives into account. Companies can no longer work in the traditional linear fashion.

What fascinates me is not so much the academic explanation but rather the big and small, everyday expressions that I see of this change. Can you see them? Are you interested in the stories? Would you like to discuss their future consequences? This blog will have some academic elements but it will be mainly explorative! At is best it might be an eye opener.

Join me on this trip!

Close up of the Macintosh PowerBook 100 from 1991. The first computer that was both really portable and and good looking. A fine piece of late modernistic machinery.