Las Vegas — Developers for the consumer market should worry less about wowing users with gizmos and features, and more about how consumers actually use the devices, speakers and papers concluded at the International Conference of Consumer Electronics (ICCE). Attendees heard repeated calls for a change in their approach to design.

“We are part of an emerging ‘network economy,’ ” where consumers have access to downloadable content from a broadening variety of sources in an expanding universe of venues, from home to car to personal space, noted ICCE keynoter William Lumpkins, director of engineering at Pragmatics Technology Inc. Thus, he said, developers’ focus should be shifting from the devices themselves to the consumers who buy them.

Good article about the need to have multidisciplinary approaches with a passion for psychology as well as industrial design. Design teams need to embrace ethnology and the study of social cultures. Design teams are now staffed by psychologists, artists, industrial designers, musicians, architects and engineers.

Read the article on ICCE’s website.