Logitech
Presently, I am writing a case study on Logitech's design, engineering, and marketing of mice, gamepads, and remote controls from 1988-2007. This will comprise a chapter on the historical points of convergence and divergence between remote controls, gamepads, and computer peripherals.
The following is a short preamble:
Television watching, home videogaming, and personal computing are distinct domestic practices, and yet the devices we use for each have converged over the past two decades. Logitech’s practice of User-Centered Design and its interdepartmental organization has been instrumental in the wider infrastructure supporting convergence of remote controls, gamepads, and mice, and by extension, their respective media formats.
There is a pervasive tendency in media studies to follow Jenkins (2006) in understanding convergence as the merging of old and new media formats which results from the digitization of content. Media studies can learn, from the disciplines of HCI and design history, that media consumption is more than a matter of content, whether industry- or user-generated, but also a matter of competency that develops from users’ habituated practices with the tools they use for consumption. Convergence therefore concerns more than economic and socio-cultural effects: the physical environments in which we consume media are intensively designed to facilitate an intuitive set of gestures and digital articulations that become standardized across media formats. These leisure activities are habit-forming and fostered through consistency, which is a key principle in interaction design. Thus there is another level of infrastructure, beyond Jenkins’s purview and beyond the technological innovations in RF transceiver chips and MEMS, that has made possible the convergence of remote controls, gamepads, and mice. Companies that have a well-established practice of User-Centered Design, such as Logitech, have built effective infrastructures of communication and coordination across the various departments involved in their product development.
,
The following is a short preamble:
Television watching, home videogaming, and personal computing are distinct domestic practices, and yet the devices we use for each have converged over the past two decades. Logitech’s practice of User-Centered Design and its interdepartmental organization has been instrumental in the wider infrastructure supporting convergence of remote controls, gamepads, and mice, and by extension, their respective media formats.
There is a pervasive tendency in media studies to follow Jenkins (2006) in understanding convergence as the merging of old and new media formats which results from the digitization of content. Media studies can learn, from the disciplines of HCI and design history, that media consumption is more than a matter of content, whether industry- or user-generated, but also a matter of competency that develops from users’ habituated practices with the tools they use for consumption. Convergence therefore concerns more than economic and socio-cultural effects: the physical environments in which we consume media are intensively designed to facilitate an intuitive set of gestures and digital articulations that become standardized across media formats. These leisure activities are habit-forming and fostered through consistency, which is a key principle in interaction design. Thus there is another level of infrastructure, beyond Jenkins’s purview and beyond the technological innovations in RF transceiver chips and MEMS, that has made possible the convergence of remote controls, gamepads, and mice. Companies that have a well-established practice of User-Centered Design, such as Logitech, have built effective infrastructures of communication and coordination across the various departments involved in their product development.
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