As reported in September's Icon issue, Intel is working with the Design Interaction course at the Royal College of Arts and Goldsmiths Interactive Research Studio to imagine the future of consumer electronics.
What is interesting is that a company like Intel is paying for research which focuses on insight than new product development. As Anthony Dunne, of Dunne & Raby, says: 'You don't know how something you're doing can have a commercial or technological outcome. But the assumption is that [Intel] will find something of value...'. From my experience you invariably do find considerable value as design research is as much about about understanding human behaviour as it is about developing new products and services. Genevieve Bell, of Intel, goes a bit further than that arguing that 'design can be at its most useful not in its ability to create physical objects as such but in its ability to redirect our thinking'.