THE EMOTIONAL SLOWDOWN

By now I’m sure you would have heard of the acronym ‘Ci-F’ (Custom Install High Fidelity). For those that aren’t familiar with the term, it’s an acronym that I created some time ago to help focus the industry toward the (inevitable) growth in demand for better engineered and higher performing audio and cinema solutions.

You could say that I have been an evangeliser for the benefits of well-engineered audio solutions for a long time, and it seems that I was onto something with CEDIA, CE-Pro, Future Source and other industry surveys/ reports outlining the increasing demand for high performance and luxury audio solutions. It makes sense as automation/control is getting better and simpler, but also saturated and commoditised as price vs performance comes down, making it more accessible and less exclusive. The same could also be said of networking and the IT aspects of the projects. This, in turn, leaves more percentage spend to focus on better AV performance, but also a greater focus on wellness, opening up options for up-scaling gaming experiences with driving and golf simulators. So how is best to capitalise?

Designing For Emotional Experience

Don Norman from the Nielsen Norman Group wrote a seminal book called Emotional Design. He explained emotion as having a critical part to play in how we all live, something that gives us a value/judgment system. The key question we should ask is, how do we design to create visceral, behavioural, and reflective/ lasting emotional reactions from our clientele? This necessitates us taking a holistic and customer-focused approach. We must ask ourselves, why? We need to spend time to learn our clients better, so we can deliver the service and performance that solicits positive reactions, ensuring these are long-lasting emotion-based relationships.

THE TOTALITY OF EXPERIENCE OR, DESIGN THINKING

This subject has been well discussed by many esteemed colleagues, but I think we should focus on it more and try to apply it to our everyday thinking. It links perfectly back to the previous point on emotional experience as it’s about applying a customer-centric approach to how we design systems, and I would suggest reading CEDIA’s Integrator of 2027 white paper for more insights.

Being customer-centric in each design requirement is important. We applied this at Fine Sounds UK when we set out to exceed at each customer service experience for our dealers. We simply defined that we should see each interaction from this view: customer -> dealer -> us, this helped to avoid bias. By doing so, we were able to create systems that gave our integrators easy and immediate access to data, which is what they really need to be more customer focused. By taking this approach to CI, you do the same thing, but as you’re closer to the client, you spend time with them, and can empathise and learn. By doing so, you’ll create an awesome day to day experience. That’s the magic!

The ‘art of slowdown’ is another idea I have been musing on lately. It’s really an antidote of the day-to-day that we all experience. Allow me to explain.

80% of the world use smartphones. 91% of time on mobile phones is spent on apps, and we check our phones on average 200+ times per day – all together, around seven to eight hours per day on average of phone usage! Together with computers, televisions, and the general environment, this all translates into our brains processing up to 74GB of data per day. This is literally changing the shape of our brains and is not always having a positive effect on our wellbeing.

Therefore, we are seeing consumer trends developing around people needing simpler engagement with certain aspects of technology. From an audio basis, increase in vinyl listening is notable – there are obvious increased performance aspects to this choice of listening, but I can’t help but also believe that people are also choosing to ‘slowdown’ in the way they consume music. We can see this is the increase in CD listening. Also, seeing wellness as a focus in integration is about using technology to benefit this theme of slowing down. I can only see this growing in the future as our clients seek an antidote to their busy, data driven lives.