kurt

hp+ kurt

The Other Valley

After a month of living and working at HP Labs Palo Alto in the Silicon Valley, I'm like Dian Fossey now, universally regarded as an outsider but curiously accepted (tolerated?) as mostly non-threatening and even beneficial. So naturally I'm somewhat disappointed. And this is where the metaphor breaks down, because unlike a ethologist observing mountain gorillas in Rwanda, committed to preservation and protection of the natural environment, I want to slash and burn.

I realize how violent that sounds in these sensitive times. That's why I wrote it. HP is struggling to change, shifting the mass and momentum of an 80 billion USD corporate ink and paper juggernaut towards "the consumer experience." Predictably however, the target remains vague and misunderstood by a company of engineers and MBAs that are trained to solve technical problems rather than social and (gasp) entertainment ones.

So what do I do here? A lowly summer intern recruited from the USC School of Cinema-Television, a hire probably partially motivated because of an infatuation with the reputation that the university evokes, my influence is severely limited to the scope of a single project investigating the potential market for a slimly interactive custom television experience. So a strategy of calculated subversion seems critical so far. The challenge becomes affecting the core design direction, beyond just aesthetics, so that the total experience for the user/viewer/guest/audience never feels unintuitive. But I have the whole summer.