In this article in the Journal of Applied Ergonomics, entitled 'From telephones to iPhones: Applying systems thinking to networked, interoperable products' the authors point out that consumer electronics have turned into complex, networked platforms for services, as opposed to the 'as is' stand alone consumer electronics of twenty years ago. Designing these products, they argue, requires a systems thinking design approach. In the insightful, but sometimes a bit fuzzily worded article, the authors use the iPhone as a case study to illustrate their point. Below I've listed a number of trends they identify, emphasizing what I consider the most important ones, and supplemented here and there with my own examples.

Increased complexity
Current consumer electronics can perform a broad range of tasks. Often a product category, such as mobile phones, may have started out basic (consider the first telephones), but the very presence of this new product triggered people to think about new possible functions for the product, in a process that the authors call coevolution, resulting in what's known as feature creep or blithe.

Product-service combination
Often consumer electronics are part of a service offering, as in for example the mobile phone, which is an interface to the service your telecom provider offers. As the authors put it:

Are some consumer products becoming a bit more like services? Is it the case that ‘‘It’s not what you sell a customer, it's what you do for them. It’s not what something is, it’s what it is connected to, what it does.’’?

Networked
In addition electronic consumer products are becoming more and more networked: your DVD recorder is part of a network with your TV and cable decoder and possible you've even added a home theatre system to that. This - in combination with a sometimes near-criminal lack of standardization in the consumer electronics industry - offers a splendid opportunity for a whole range of new possibilities for system failure, interconnectivity, and usability issues.

'Connected'
Now if you have a blue-ray player instead of a DVD-recorder your personal network is in turn connected to the Internet. The authors of the article don't explicitly distinguish between 'networked' and 'connected', but I like the distinction between a product being connected to other products in a local network for the purpose of reinforcing or enabling each others functionality, and a product being able to access a communications network (such as the Internet) for the purpose of accessing or communicating information. Interestingly, apart from accessing information and services, connectedness gives product developers the ability to update the product after they have launched it, which is standard practice for software, but pretty new for consumer electronics.

Systems thinking
These trends suggest you no longer sell people a product that offers a specific functionality. You give people something they can customize according to their needs. There's a shift from - as the authors put it - end products to initial conditions (for product use). However, that makes it kind of hard to predict how people will use your product and how to design it, and that's where systems thinking approach comes in.

Systems thinking is ‘‘a framework for conceptualizing or viewing the world’’ (Carvajal, 1983, p. 230). In this regard the networked, interoperable consumer products that are the topic of this paper are conceptually no different from any large-scale system to which ‘systems thinking’ is normally applied. Although rarely seen in this way, certain types of product can also be seen as '‘a set of interrelated elements’’ (Hall and Fagen, 1956 cited in Carvajal, 1983) and a ‘‘regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole’’ (Merriam-Webster, 2007). [...] In a sense the information-age raises the systemic level at which products need to be considered, in other words the designer needs to include more of the world in their design..

A new framework for human-product interaction
As a consequence, when looking at human-product interaction frameworks (which indicate what components make up the interaction and how they are related) we should not only consider the interaction between the individual user and his/her product, but also the interaction with other products and other people, as I outlined in this earlier post and this article on user-centred design for sustainable behavior.



Reference
Walker, G., Stanton, N., Jenkins, D., Salmon, P., March 2009. From telephones to iphones: Applying systems thinking to networked, interoperable products. Applied Ergonomics 40 (2), 206-215.