"ID" for Philips

id, instinct, instinctual drives, desires.
the pleasure principle, Freud.

what are our instinctual desires?
surely they vary widely from person to person,
overlap broadly across individual cultures
and, on certain elemental levels, are shared by all of humanity.

food, love, shelter.
improvement, education, invention.
dreams, diversions, tools.

how do we accommodate our id?
if the desires spring forth instinctually intact from our subconscious, the task is easy: eat, drink, enjoy.
if, however, the desires remain partially submerged in the murky depths of our beings,
the task becomes difficult; for how can we truly hope to accommodate that which we can not fully define?

and how can we, as a company, create products that are relevant for both
the easily defined and the hard to define?

the first prerequisite for us is extreme understanding borne of sensitive studiousness.

next, we must become experts at anticipation, a pursuit which tests our own human-ness,
straining the power of our sympathetic imagination and pushing us beyond the limits of
visualization imposed by our current technologies.

we must know our consumers better than they know themselves
and have the inventiveness to answer their questions before they are asked.

finally, we must ensure that our more indulgent instincts never override our better ones,
engaging in an educated self-control that precludes the sacrifice of function to frivolity:
because we are not in the business of products for the sake of products,
we are in the business of products for the sake of people.

our three-pronged mandate is to approach our work as anthropologists first,
inventors second, and ruthless editors third.

only then can we hope to create the objects that become the subjects of instinctual desires.
objects of such naturalness, objects that resonate so directly with people’s ids,
and offer such intuitive functionality, that they have what we call instinctual design.

that’s our id, the philips id, instinctual design.
and it’s the greatest thing we make.

philips
let’s make things better.