The Windows Vista Dream PC Design Program

Despite 30 years of innovation and growth, research consistently shows that the personal computer bears an uninspired, grey stigma that can obscure individual brands in consumers' eyes. Popular TV ads tap into this stigma. The design strategy sought to shift this identity dramatically by creating a model set of Windows Vista-based PCs. Achieving this required: field research into deeply rooted consumer needs and desires, designing compelling new user scenarios and system configurations to enable them, optimizing conditions for user experience design across the industry, establishing new relationships between internal software teams and external hardware partners, modeling hardware and software interactions effectively, building working prototypes to inspire partners and press and translating Windows Vista design principles into a hardware design language that was universally shared.