Further research...

Swiss Army Knife sales have been hit hard after the September 11th terrorist attacks and the recent alerts at airports throughout Britain. Victorinox used to supply a large amount of knives both in airport departure lounges and even on board planes before the attacks and the banning of these items in airports and the confiscation of any undeclared knives has meant the plummet of what has been a very lucrative market for Victorinox.

Victorinox is owned by Carl Elsener, the great-grandson of Karl Elsener who invented the Swiss Army Knife way back in 1884. The company is always looking for new ideas and models to sell, to keep up with the change in a globalised world. The idea of essentially a tool manufacturers’ scale of development from humble beginnings to being on the doorstep of producing a multimedia ‘tool’ is what gave me my inspiration for my project.

Imagine Victorinox being taken over by a different company and the future of the Swiss Army Knife was altered in a way which I suspect wouldn’t be allowed under its current ownership. The Swiss Army Knife could (in an exaggerated example) become my idea of a multimedia device, hardly recognizable as the Swiss Army Knife that I would know of. It would lose its sense of its ‘self’, its sense of origin.

In a modern, globalised, multimedia ‘e-world’ this example could be showed in almost anything. The idea that demand overshadows identity or that an object’s individuality and origin are somehow lost through the supply to a demanding society. Manufacturer’s judgment would be clouded by the excessive drive for something that sells, what the people want, that will make money.

I can see the change in Victorinox’s stance:

"We are not giving up," says the firm's spokesman Hans Schorno. "We are going to fight."

With the recent release of the USB Swiss Army Knife, Victorinox has taken a major leap toward my idea of the complete Multimedia Swiss Army Knife. This may look like a natural response to a company that has rich traditions and history behind it trying to defend its heritage and origin in an ever changing world of business but I think it’s more than that. It may just happen in the future we forget the meanings of objects and where they came from in terms of functionality. I don’t see it as that radical an idea that this won’t happen seeing as there are examples of it already.