Category: design | 設計 | 예술과 디자인 | デザイン

Design was something that was important to me from the start of this blog, over different incarnations of the blog, I featured interesting design related news. Design is defined as a plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, interfaces or other object before it is made.

But none of the definition really talks about what design really is in the way that Dieter Rams principles of good design do. His principles are:

It is innovative
It makes a product useful
It is aesthetic
It makes a product understandable
It is unobtrusive
It is honest
It is long-lasting
It is thorough down to the last detail
It is environmentally-friendly – it can and must maintain its contribution towards protecting and sustaining the environment.
It is as little design as possible

Bitcoin isn’t long lasting as a network, which is why people found the need to fork the blockchain and build other cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin uses 91 terawatts of energy annually or about the entire energy consumption of Finland.

The Bitcoin network relies on thousands of miners running energy intensive machines 24/7 to verify and add transactions to the blockchain. This system is known as “proof-of-work.” Bitcoin’s energy usage depends on how many miners are operating on its network at any given time. – So Bitcoin is environmentally unfriendly by design.

On the other hand, Apple products, which are often claimed to be also influenced by Dieter Rams also fail his principles. They aren’t necessarily environmentally friendly as some like AirPods are impossible to repair or recycle.

2024 iPad Pro
In my take on the 2024 iPad Pro I am going to look at things through three lenses and after the initial hot takes have cooled down. These three lenses are:
- Hardware
- Semiconductors
- Advertisement
Apple and Microsoft both push their most powerful tablets like the 2024 iPad Proas creator tools. However, at the time of writing I have been working alongside creative teams in a prominent ad agency and both the creative and strategic elements of the work we were doing were pulled together using different software, but the same hardware. Apple MacBook Pro computers and large secondary monitors. An illustrator attached a ‘graphics tablet‘ alongside their laptop to provide additional tactile control, just in the same way I am known to use an outboard Kensington trackball for additional fine control in creating presentation charts.

Where I have seen iPads used:
- Senior (older executives) replying to emails – I suspect its because the screen is bigger than a smartphone.
- As a media player device. The iPad is the travel and bedside equivalent of the book and the portable DVD player.
- As a presentation device. Friends that give a lot of public presentations at conferences and one who works as a university lecturer both use the iPad as device to present from in place of lugging around a laptop.
In all of these use cases, there isn’t that much to differentiate iPad models and the main limitations are user intent or software-related.

My parents use an iPad I’ve bought them to keep in touch with me. We started using an iPad as a Skype client over a decade ago. Then iMessage and FaceTime started to make more sense, particularly has they started getting Skype spam. It’s the computing equivalent of a kitchen appliance: largely intuitive and very little can go really wrong – that’s both the iPad’s strength and its weakness.

Secondly, there is the confusion of the Apple iPad product line-up, which is at odds with the way Apple got its second wind. In Walter Isaacson’s flawed autobiography of Steve Jobs, one of the standout things that the returning CEO did was ruthlessly prune the product line-up.

He made it into a 2 x 2 grid: professional and consumer, portable and desktop. For most of past number of years, the iPhone has gone down this ‘pro and consumer’ split.

The iPad line-up is less clear cut to the casual observer:
- iPad Mini
- iPad
- iPad Air
- iPad Pro
In addition, there are Apple pencils – a smarter version of the stylus that used to be used prior to capacitive touchscreens became commonplace. Some of these pencils work with some devices, but not others. It’s a similar case, with other Apple accessories like keyboards that double as device covers. All of which means that your hardware accessories need an upgrade too. This is more than just getting a new phone case. It’s more analogous to having to buy a new second monitor or mouse every time you change your computer.

With all of that out of the way, let’s get into hardware.

Hardware

The 2024 iPad Pro launched before the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, so we had no idea how the device will work together in conjunction with iPadOS 18. Addressing long term criticism of using the iPad is as much about software as it is about hardware.

The 2024 iPad Pro still doesn’t have a definitive user case, but Apple decided to focus on creativity in their marketing.

Presumably this is because the main thing to celebrate about the 2024 iPad Pro is increased computing power and creative apps are the most likely to make use of that power. For many ‘non-creative’ use cases, the previous generation of iPad Pro is very over-powered for what it does.

Some of the choices Apple made with the hardware are interesting. The existing iPad Pro is a thin, lightweight computing device. The 2024 iPad Pro is Apple’s thinnest device ever. This thinness is a clever feat of engineering, but so would be an iPad of the same size, but with more battery capacity. Instead Apple made the device made things a bit thinner device with exactly the same battery life as previous models.

The iPad Pro uses two screens one behind the other to provide deeper and brighter colours at a resolution that’s extremely high. This provides additional benefits such as avoiding screen burn-in which OLED screens were considered to be vulnerable to.

The camera has moved from the side to the top of the 2024 iPad Pro in landscape mode. This has necessitated a new arrangement of magnets for attachments, which then drove the need for new accessories including the new Apple pencil pro.

Semiconductors

The M4 processor is Apple’s latest silicon design and represents a move on from the current processors in Apple’s Mac range.

It is made by TSMC on a leading edge 3 nanometre process. This is TSMC’s second-generation process. Having it as the processor in the 2024 iPad Pro, allows Apple and partners to slowly ramp up production and usage of the new processor to match gains in semiconductor chip yields. This will give them the time to iron out any production challenges and resolve any quality issues. Relatively low production volumes would be a good thing, prior to the processor being rolled out more widely.

Apple seems to be designing the M-series processors in parallel to the A-series processors used in iPhones and iPads in the past. They seem to have them in mind for a wider range of devices.

Advertisement

Apple previewed an advertisement to promote the 2024 iPad Pro.

Crush has been executed with a high degree of craft in the production. It had a lot of negative reactions from celebrities and current Apple customers who saw it in terms of:
- It being a wider metaphor of what technology was perceived to be doing to creativity. For instance, Hollywood actors and screen-writers are concerned about streaming and the effects of large language models.
- Destroying real-life artefacts that consumers have attached meaning to. For instance, I use digital music, but also have a physical music collection that not only reflects my taste, but much more. Real-world experiences now provide respite from the digital world.
With product launches like the iPhone 3, Apple created adverts which were less of a literal metaphor for everything that could be crammed into the device by using show-and-tell.

Reversing the Crush! ad makes a similar point, but in a less oppressive way.

And as with everything else in life, there is seldom a time when an idea is truly new. There was an ad done by BBH London which used a crush metaphor to demonstrate all the features in LG’s Renoir phone circa 2008. As this circulated around Apple was perceived as being a copycat.

Presentation

Given that Apple events are now largely virtual post-COVID we didn’t have a positive live audience reaction amongst those who ‘got it’ to guide public opinion. Instead it was left on social media ‘contextless’.

The Apple exhibition centre at the new ‘space ship’ campus, doesn’t seem to be used in the same way that Apple did live events prior to 2020. Apple held small event screenings for journalists in New York and London.

But was Crush! bad?

When I first saw it, I thought that it was good from a craft point of view. I was a bit surprised at how dark the lighting was, it felt a little off-key.

My personal opinion about the concept was that it felt a bit heavy-handed because it was so literal. The creative brief done by a strategist is usually the jumping off point, not the literal creative concept.

But that doesn’t make it bad advert, it just felt not particularly clever for someone who is probably more media-literate than the average person. I would go as far as to say, it would have been unlikely to win creative advertising awards.

But I was also aware that my opinion didn’t mean that the ad wouldn’t be effective. Given the 2024 iPad Pro’s role as M4 guinea pig, Apple probably weren’t hoping for barn-storming sales figures and in the grand scheme of things the advert just wasn’t extremely important.

I was probably as blindsided as Apple was by the depth of feeling expressed in the online reaction.

TL;DR I don’t know if Crush! really is ‘bad’. Let’s ask some specific questions about different aspects of the ad.

Am I, or the negative responders the target market?

Maybe, or maybe not. I don’t have a place in it in my current workflow. I still find that a Mac works as my primary creative technology device. What about if Apple were aiming at college kids and first jobbers? These people wouldn’t come to buying the 2024 iPad Pro with the same brand ‘baggage’ that me and many of the commentators have.

Working in marketing, the 1984 ad and the Think Different ads were campaigns were classics. Hell, I can remember being a bit of an oddball at college as a Mac user. I helped friends get their secondhand Mac purchases up and running.

Going to coffee shops or working in the library and seeing a see of laptop lids emblazoned with the Dell, Gateway, Toshiba and H-P logos. If people were a bit quirky they may have a Sony Vaio instead.

I remember the booes and the hisses in the audience at MacWorld Boston in 1997, when Apple announced its partnership with Microsoft.

Even when I worked at Yahoo! during the web 2.0 renaissance, Mac users were second-class citizens internally and externally in terms of our product offering.

In the eyes of young people today Apple was always there, front and centre. The early iPad or iPhone experience as pacifier. The iPhone has must-have teenage smartphone. The Mac at home and maybe an Apple TV box.

Finally many high performing adverts of the past aimed at young adults have left the mainstream media and tastemakers non-plussed.

How did the ad test?

According to anecdotal evidence I have heard from people at IPSOS; in a survey they found that about half the respondents surveyed said they would be interested in finding out more about the 2024 iPad Pro. The younger the respondent, the more likely they were to be interested in the device.

System 1, tested the ad and found that it performed 1.9 out of a possible maximum score of 5. In System 1 parlance this indicates somewhere between low and modest long term brand growth derived from the advertisement. The average score for US advertisements is 2.3. But over half of ads that were run in the Super Bowl this year scored between 1 and 2. Which would imply that the ad could be improved; but the devil might be in the details as implied by the IPSOS research.

Is Crush! just a copy cat?

You can have the best creative director in the world who has seen a lot of advertising, but they might not know all advertising. Secondly, the advertising industry is getting rid of long term professionals. According to the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising no one retired from the industry in 2023, as staff were ‘phased out‘ of the industry way before retirement age. All of which means that there isn’t the historical memory to know if a campaign is sailing close to plagiarism.

And it isn’t just advertising. Earlier in my career, I got to see former business journalist and newspaper editor Damian McCrystal speak at a breakfast event. One thing stayed with me about his presentation, in which he talked about the financial industry:

The reasons why we make the same mistakes over-and-over again is because ‘the city’ has a collective institutional memory of about eight years.
Damien McCrystal

So we had Northern Rock, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, despite the fact that pretty much every financier I have ever met had read Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis. This was based on his experiences as a banker navigating the Savings and Loans scandal of the 1980s and 1990s.

So no, despite the similarity of the LG Renoir advertisement, I don’t think that Crush! was an intentional copy.

More related content can be found here.

More information

Some thoughts about Apple’s new iPads | Ian Betteridge

The M4 iPad Pros | Daring Fireball

Brief Thoughts and Observations on Yesterday’s ‘Let Loose’ iPad Keynote | Daring Fireball

How Apple’s ‘tone deaf’ iPad ad signals a turning point | FT

Apple’s New iPad Ad Leaves Its Creative Audience Feeling … Flat – The New York Times

Apple’s new iPad ad has struck a nerve online. Here’s why | AP News

Commentary: Apple’s tone-deaf iPad ad triggers our darkest AI fears – CNA

The Fat iPhone, 11 years on: The iPad’s over a decade old and we’re still not sure what it’s for • The Register

12 things I learned by switching from the 13-inch MacBook Pro to the 12.9-inch iPad Pro | Macworld
June 4, 2024
Car screens and synthesisers
The current debate over car screens / car as computer design reminded me a lot of the journey that synthesisers have gone through.

I went down this train of thought on car screens thanks to a LinkedIn post by Nic Roope, reacting to an article published in Car Design News in praise of push buttons.

There is a view in car circles that the reliance on screens to mediate so many of the functions of a car can be a bad thing. I can understand it. For enthusiasts driving a car is still a very analogue experience including the haptics of direct steering connectivity and a manual gearbox.

I would be remiss if I didn’t share the opinion of Doug DeMuro who argued the case for screens in terms of two reasons:
- Costs. Buttons cost more money and there would be the associated connectors. Modern vehicles offer such a range of controls, that doing them in buttons rather than soft buttons and car screens would be cost and space prohibitive.
- Technological momentum. DeMuro essentially articulates a position similar to Kevin Kelly’s concept of the technium in his book What Technology Wants. Kelly uses a biological metaphor of progress as an organism or Gaia type metaphor that keeps growing and moving at its own pace. While Kelly has been accused to techno-mysticism, we do know that the development of key technologies like television or the light bulb were happening at the same time in different parts of the world in isolation from each other – there had become a time when they were inevitable.
the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us
Kevin Kelly on the technetium in What Technology Wants

Colin Chapman versus software engineers.

DeMuro’s first point is based on the proposition that all this extra control in car screens is a good thing. Do we really need to have car interior mood lighting? And if we do, do we need to have colours that result in night blindness and make the car interior looks like a booth at a bottle service bar in Dubai?

For some drivers, the answer will be no.

Different car manufacturers have had different models that do very different things. One of the philosophies articulated most by car enthusiasts is that of Lotus cars founder Colin Chapman “simplify, and add lightness”.

Chapman’s design ethos was very in-tune with the likes of mid-century thinkers like polymath Buckminster Fuller and those he influenced notably architect Sir Norman Foster.

Chapman’s world view wasn’t perfect his vehicles were fragile and had quality issues, partly due to his daring use of new materials and techniques influenced by aerospace. It’s also a world away from the Tesla approach, where the vehicle can’t be started up without the screen even as a ‘limp mode’ function.

Instead the Tesla pickup and car screens are infested with boondoggles including:
- A video of a fireplace filled with burning logs
- A game that allows you to break the windows of a virtual CyberTruck
- Customisable horn sounds including celebrity voices
- A pre-programmed light show
Modern car economics.

Car screens have advanced in tock-step with the move towards an electric car future. A technology transition at the best of times is difficult, but the car industry has other problems that will impact consumer views of vehicles.

Consumer choice.

In the 1970s cars cars seldom lasted over a decade, but due to improvements in corrosion treatment and car design that removed water traps the potential life of a car was extended. Given that classic cars are much less damaging to the environment. The average classic emits 563kg of CO2 per year, yet an average passenger car has a 6.8-tonne carbon footprint immediately after production. This means that a new car would need to be run for several years to achieve a similar climate ‘payback’ and older cars can be attractive for consumers, if they meet their needs reliably.

Vehicle affordability.

Over the time I have held a driving licence, the secondhand car market went from being the dumping ground for fleet sales to the Alice In Wonderland after effects of the lease agreements that drove new and nearly-new car sales. The financialisation of the car market isn’t without risk and has been considered a possible future risk in the way that consumer finance and home mortgages have been in the past.

So what do car touchscreens have to do with synthesisers?

In order to answer that question, we need to go back in time. Massive steps forward in electronics had inspired research into different ways of creating sounds based on modulation techniques used in radio broadcast signals for decades. In the 1960s digital technology was also moving forward and provided a more stable base for FM synthesis. Stanford University scholars worked with Yamaha technologists to turn FM synthesis into a product.

The first instrument that it appeared in was the New England Digital Synclavier, who had licensed the technology from Yamaha. The Synclavier, was a couple of racks full of computer storage, a processing unit, cooling and audio interfaces. This was all connected up to a monitor and a keyboard. Over time the Synclavier would evolve into the ancestor of the modern digital audio workstation (DAW) like Apple’s Logic Pro app.

1983, comes around and Yamaha is finally ready to launch a mainstream product featuring FM synthesis. it also features MIDI, a standard that is still used to control musical instruments (and other studio equipment) remotely. Roland had released a couple of devices that supported the standard.

But Yamaha’s DX7 proved to be the blockbuster product. At that time electronic music was a niche interest and instrument manufacturers would be very lucky to sell 50,000 units. Yamaha sold over 300,000 units in the first three years of sales over its 7 year life and 10,000s of more devices of the DX and TX families.

Digital changes the interface

Analogue synthesisers wer full of switches and dials. This Oberheim synthesiser above, isn’t that different from its analogue predecessors from five decades prior.

The DX7 was a very different beast, it couldn’t have a dial or button for every parameter, rather like modern car screens with endless settings. So it had a few buttons which changed their function depending on what the synthesiser. A few earlier models had limited sales with a similarly spartan approach, but the DX7 mainstreamed the idea.

A few things happened that might be instructive for how we now think about car screens:
- Other synthesiser manufacturers like Roland and Korg copied Yamaha’s approach to interface design. Some of them tried using devices like jog wheels to provide additional intuitive control, in a similar way conceptually to BMW’s iDrive interface for its car screens.
- Software companies looked to fill the gap to provide a better interface, which eventually begat modern software digital audio workstation applications like Logic Pro. We might see similar developments sold for cars, and this is likely the opportunity that the likes of Apple CarPlay sees. There is consumer demand to support it.
- Despite the obvious benefit of soft button driven instruments, there still remained a strong demand for analogue controls. Now there is a strong demand for tactile interface controls and old style synthesis. In the car world that would equate to providing car enthusiasts with analogue experiences, while the mainstream goes to Tesla minimalism of the car screen. We can see this in the design of Hyundai’s analogue feeling performance electric cars that try and emulate a manual gear box and Ineos’ switch gear that owes more to aviation than automotive manufacturing.
You can find similar posts to this here.

More information

Average Age of Cars in Great Britain | NimbleFins

In praise of pushbuttons (and other physical controls) | Car Design News

Car pollution facts: from production to disposal, what impact do our cars have on the planet? | Auto Express

MIDI Quest Pro Yamaha DX7 software editor

Patchbase Yamaha DX7 software editor
May 22, 2024
Coffee shop problem
One of my friends who I first met when we were working on global brands at Unilever, took a change in career running their own chocolatier and coffee shop at a lovely market town outside London.

Coffee shops for years have had a nice line in selling branded insulated cups. The rationale is that these cups can be re-used and act as branded marketing for the shop. In the past you have had a push on using these insulated cups in the name of going green. There was a mix of take-up, but adoption was increasing over time.

The barriers to using re-usable cups include:
- Having a cup big enough to take your drink. Coffee shop chains offer their branded cups. And if you don’t want to be a Café Nero billboard, you can buy cups from the likes of Stanley that will keep your drink warm for up to eight hours.
- Having your cup with you. For drivers having a cup and a cup holder in their vehicle is easy enough. the challenge is when they take it into the home or workplace to clean the cup. They need to remember to have it back in their car. Public transport users have a similar problem but need a bag to hold their cup and their work ritual paraphernalia. One of the benefits of a single-use cup is not having to remember.
- Having to wash the cups. Coffee shops have to wash cups used by people drinking in a coffee shop, but customers coming in with re-usable cups would need an immediate clean. I did notice in a Starbucks in a Hong Kong neighbourhood that customers left their cups overnight with the shop. However for most shops relying on customers to clean the cup themselves and a quick blast of steam from the coffee machine cappuccino function should be enough.
Customer habits

Pre-COVID the coffee shop problem looked as if it was being slowly but surely being addressed. This was because a significant minority of customers were going to their local coffee shop near work or home with a reusable cup. You are building a smaller habit with a bigger habit as a trigger: taking your reusable cup with you as you leave home prepared for work.

COVID-19 changed the whole coffee shop experience. Insurance companies had already been pushing store-owners towards cashless transactions. But now hygiene had its place as well. We were divided from baristas with a sea of perspex and reusable cups were not accepted.

Wider daily routines were broken with working from home, and the atomic habit of a daily caffeine fix was shattered. There were other aspects going on as well. Consumers got used to making coffee at home, or not going into their workplace at all. A regular coffee habit has been more difficult to reform due to hybrid working and the cost of living crisis probably hasn’t. helped the coffee shop problem either.

Back to my friend’s coffee shop

So back to the discussion that inspired this post:

We give a 30p discount for bringing your own takeaway cup, but out of the almost 400 takeaway drinks we’ve served in the last week only 11 times have we been able to give this discount. We’ve started talking about how we can help facilitate this behaviour change more as part of our sustainability drives. One idea being explored is to actually start charging for takeaway cups rather than discounting for bringing your own…

This equates to less than 2.75% redemption rate. My take on the coffee shop problem is outlined below:

Reduce friction and doubt: Tell people you will accept any takeaway cup that has room to hold the coffee (if its bigger thats fine).

Optimise any behaviour change activities that you are likely to implement: a Phil Graves research outlined in Consumerology supports the heuristic that positive reinforcement tends to be slightly better over time. But one thing to remember is that behavioural change is a war of inches. For instance reframe the above statement ‘In just one week we’ve already helped almost 3 percent of our customer base move to reusable cups’. This then becomes a social proof that encourages consumer reading the copy to be part of a growing movement.

A cup ‘fine’ might be like a sin tax – this paper on late pick up fines at an Israeli childcare centre is often quoted in behaviour change books. Here’s a synopsis of story laid out in the research paper. In day care centres in Israel, economists tried to help schools identify ways to reduce late pick-ups. Economists conducted a study by announcing that any parent arriving more than ten minutes late would pay a $3 fine. After the fine was enacted, the number of late pickups promptly went up by 100%. As soon as parents had the option to pay a small fine and avoid the guilt of making a teacher wait, they took it en masse.

More posts similar to this can be found here.
May 15, 2024
Shutting down
Shutting down is a conscious choice. You might see it described as digital detox or a digital break. I, like a number of people that I know have a ‘dumb’ phone to complement my smartphone. This is different from the pre-broadband era of the internet where going online was an active decision punctuated by the sound of the modem.

At that time, keeping in touch was an active decision rather than the tyranny of the pings from messaging applications. We cocooned ourselves from each other with a personal audio soundtrack via an iPod or a Discman. This cocooning effect was viewed to have a positive effect on personal autonomy was called the Walkman effect by sociologists.

Once you used a device be it the modem-connected PC, TV or music player you went through the act of shutting down devices. My parents still go room-to-room at night shutting down devices.

My Nokia N95

Over the past two decades we have stopped shutting down. A number of things happened:
- Phone as Swiss Army knife. Cellphones quickly became our alarm clock. Working on the Nokia N93 launch with Flickr (then part of Yahoo!) felt like a watershed moment allowing photos to be taken and shared instantly online. During the July 7th London bombing, I got home by navigating with the ring bound A-Z atlas of London, which lived in the bottom of my backpack. Now I have four apps that would use depending what I wanted to do.
- Device as social currency, your smartphone says as much about your economic health as your car. It’s a hygiene level of status, just like branded training shoes (sneakers) were when I was at school.
- Synchronous social media. The now long-forgotten iNQ SkypePhone, BlackBerry and Danger Sidekick heralded no-shutting down engagement.
- Dark patterns / design techniques used to encourage app or service use as a compulsion. It is no coincidence that a number of senior design and engineering teams at Tinder and Instagram sat in BJ Fogg’s persuasive computing design (captology) modules, yet the products used techniques that Fogg described as unethical.
Parent and policy voices.

The key points that activists and concerned parents talk about revolve around the following talking points:
- Screens now dominate our lives, and their presence is only getting stronger and more powerful. For instance, I can no longer phone up my local surgery to get a repeat prescription or book an appointment, it’s all mediated by the surgery website and the NHS app.
- (Some) adults can control to a certain extent how often and when they use screens. Shutting down is proving hard for many adult consumers to do. But there is a commonplace screen addiction. Empirical evidence suggests that it would be damaging for children. I could make countervailing points, here is a better place to see them outlined.
- Smartphone addiction and drug addiction share some similarities including a neglected personal life, a pre-occupation with the subject of the addiction, social media as a mood modifier or for escapism. The implication is that smartphones are an unwilling appendage which add capabilities (some of which are of a questionable value) and can’t be put down. All of which reminded me of my childhood (and adult relationship with music).
The push seems to be on regulating the services that run on top of smartphone platforms.

There doesn’t seem to be a corresponding focus on encouraging shutting down as a desirable behaviour; presumably because the efficiencies promised by digital government services are too alluring.

Under-supply.

While there might be a desire for dumb phone, there are remarkably few options as second generation mobile networks have been turned off around the world.

HMD (what was Nokia’s terminal business) is the leading player in this sector. They are starting to do clever things that tap into the idea of shutting down and being present in the meatspace at key moments.

Heineken collaborated with HMD and streetwear atelier Bodega to collaborate on a ‘dumb’ phone in a transparent case, similar to electronic devices issued in prisons.

Heineken seem to doing this for a number of reasons:
- People are less likely to be themselves when there is a broadcast studio in your pocket full of distractions to pull you away from the now.
- Shutting down allows you to be more present for your friends.
- Losing a £1,000+ device down the pub full of work information and access to your bank account isn’t a particularly attractive option. So providing a cheaper option is a bit like the ‘festival phone’ tough but basic Nokia that I bring to gigs and festivals.
Punkt.

A less well known competitor is Punkt. Punkt is a boutique Swiss consumer electronics company who have made a number of cellphones, home phones and a Braun-like alarm clock. Punkt want to promote the idea of intentional technology use, rather than as a wrapper around our everyday lives. Their MP02 phone acts as a wi-fi hotspot and a dumb cellphone, as they view a two device strategy of laptop and phone leans in better to their intentional technology use vision. Punkt make shutting down easier, by adding friction to switching on.

More related posts can be found here.

More information

Battle lines drawn as US states take on big tech with online child safety bills | Guardian Online

UK children and adults to be safer online as world-leading bill becomes law | GOV.uk

Zuckerberg among tech bosses to testify on child safety | BBC Online
May 8, 2024
Omakase and luxury futures
Omakase and luxury seem made for each other. Think about the core elements of omakase:
- An expert provides a personalised experience that is about quality, ceremony and theatre.
- The expert decides what you will have and prepares it for you. You are there from selection to the provision of the item.
- The ingredients are of fine quality (and often locally sourced).
Marc Veraart

As a trend omakase has expanded geographically with Japanese cuisine. But it has also expanded in terms of categories covered.

Koreans have taken omakase and pushed it into other areas:
- Coffee
- Dessert tasting
- Barbecue restaurants which are normally a local neighbourhood staple
- Wine and champagne-tasting
So how can omakase and luxury come together in the future?

In order to understand how omakase and luxury in the future it is worthwhile paying a good deal of attention to the pressures that the luxury industry is currently under.

Luxury is under pressure

Undoing the mistakes of the past

Luxury has expanded to be the size of industry it currently is due to ‘massification’ by most of the maisons. The exceptions to this would be the likes of Hermés.

Massification

Massification means lowering quality, using globalisation in the supply chain as well as the retail network to manufacture products cheaper. Massification occurred over a three decade period and was covered extensively by former fashion editor Dana Thomas in her book Deluxe.

Around about 2014, Gucci led the way for luxury brands to do streetwear, leading to a more accessible luxury product. Louis Vuitton did the archetypical collection with its 2017 Supreme collaboration.

Contrary to what most people believe luxury is aimed at the middle classes rather than the wealthy. But targeting middle class customers rather than the wealthy poses a number of problems:
- Increased capital outlay due to the scale required.
- Scale brings challenges in terms of supply chain management and consistency of customer experience. Greater control can be obtained by vertical integration within the supply chain and owning the retail channels. But all of this requires greater expertise and management oversight.
- Increased economic sensitivity to shocks such as interest rate and cost of living rises.
- Increased risk of devalued stock during an economic downturn. Gucci earnings were down 20 percent alone in Q1, 2024.
Bigger might not always be better over a longer view.

Secondary markets

Secondary markets have been both a boon and a bane for the luxury sector. At one time pre-owned was seen as an ‘entry-level’ product. I bought my first nice watch secondhand once it had depreciated. It was often said that the best entry-level Porsche was a secondhand one.

But gone are the days when you may buy a pre-owned Louis Vuitton purse on a second hand market stall in Paris. Now that will be on Vinted, Vestaire or some other platform.

Secondary market inflated pricing affected luxury businesses in a number of ways
- You would be interviewed to go on the waiting list for a Porsche or a Rolex.
- Authorised dealers became order takers and dealer customer service slipped.
- Your purchasing history would acquire you the rights to buy a Hermés bag over time.
Luxury groups extended their businesses into the pre-owned market. LVMH owned part of secondhand watch retailer Hodinkee. Richemont owned Watchfinder and Yoox-Net-a-Porter who sold a mix of new lines and vintage preowned items. Rolex rolled out its ‘CPO’ programme selling inspected pre-owned Rolex watches through its authorised dealer network.

Things looked really good for the luxury industry, they managed to managed to scale, to a point that LVMH is one of the largest companies in the world:
- Massification through global manufacturing supply chains.
- Keeping margins high, while letting quality go low.
- Address a rising middle class in China, Korea, Japan, the Gulf countries and Russia to counteract the hollowing out of the middle class in the US and western Europe.
- Maximising margins through controlling costs via vertical integration up and down the supply chain, from raw materials to retail.
Market change

A few things underpinned the craziness of COVID:
- Money was put in consumer pockets, for which they had few outlets.
- Supply chains were disrupted as factories closed down or pivoted to manufacturing essential products. For instances Perfums Christian Dior made hand sanitiser for hospitals for free.
A Forrester effect (also known as a bull whip effect) resulted, driving inflation that the world’s economies are coming to terms with now. Secondary effects of this event were the increased interest rates used to reduce demand driven inflation.

Other secondary effects include increased crime levels. London has gone from a luxury shoppers paradise, to having a global reputation amongst elites of being plagued by violent watch and bag robberies. COVID-19 isn’t the only driver of this crime wave, but is a contributing factor.

It has also had a catalysing effect on reducing globalisation to increase national resilience.

Consumers know that a good deal of luxury goods don’t match up with the European artisan heritage story that brands try to sell them. Experts like William Lasry has made public which brands make what kind of products where. Luxury brands often make in places like China due to capability and scale – similar reasons to why Apple products are designed in California and assembled in China. (Seriously, check out William Lasry’s channels, I love some of his visits to high-end Japanese manufacturers).

China

China has been a key focus for luxury brand, but it has changed in a number of different ways:
- Chinese consumers have changed in their confidence of native brands and have a lower opinion of many foreign brands. This is partly down to a change in attitudes called guo chao. Guo chao can be traced back to the increased confidence in the run up to the 2008 olympics in Beijing. This was partly fuelled by a series of essays published in 1996 by the likes of academic Wang Xiaodong called China Can Say Now which advocated a modern robust form of Chinese nationalism, which was in stark contrast to the Deng-era vision of globalisation and biding one’s time. In the April before the olympics Chinese consumers boycotted French supermarket brand Carrefour. Over time the negativity of these boycotts have become more-and-more performative and extra-territorial in nature. The current Xi administration has seen fit to weaponise this nationalist sentiment by directing (wrangling is a more accurate term, like cowboys with a cattle train in the Old West) public opinion to further its own ends. A more positive aspect of it has been a more open market for domestic ateliers and brands than had been seen previously. Since before 2019, there have been Chinese efforts to build a rival luxury groups to LVMH and Kering and this fits in with Xi’s distaste for irrational worship of the west.
- Xi-era growth. China under Xi Jinping faces multiple challenges around growth. The population is aging and in decline which has implications for declining consumption. Secondly economic growth has slowed compared to the double digit annual economic growth of the Deng, Jiang and Hu administrations. Foreign direct investment in China has declined for a mix of reasons including unattractive Chinese government policies, decline in China’s country brand and long term economic growth forecasts.
Regulatory change

I know what you’re thinking ok, this is very well Ged, but what does it have to do with omakase and luxury futures? Give me a little bit more time and all will be revealed.

While China is an economic superpower with a desire to export its world view and the United States is a hard and soft power super power; the European Union’s super power is legislative in nature.

European regulation drove the globalisation of the GSM mobile telephony standards during the 1990s and 2000s. They have also driven increasing internet privacy standards on web services, much to the chagrin of Alphabet, Meta and Twitter.

Now they are driving environmental standards across a range of areas including:
- A carbon tax to take into account the use of fossil fuels in extraction of raw materials, transportation, energy as an input to manufacturing and processing materials.
- Product passports from raw materials to product end-of-life encouraging a circular economy and sustainable manufacturing.
This means that the luxury sector has new restrictions on how it operates in the future.

In summary:
- We’ve likely reached peak massification due to economic and trade changes.
- Market share in China looks uncertain due to changes in consumer sentiment and tastes, meaning, a more local approach might be required or a strategic withdrawal.
- Secondary markets show that consumers are open to ownership beyond pristine new products.
- Product passports and European legislation means re-examining the whole supply chain and the data to better control it through an entire product life.
Finally, omakase and luxury futures!

Omakase and luxury look like a happy meeting in the future. Think about the tenets of omakase.
- An expert provides a personalised experience that is about quality, ceremony and theatre.
- The expert decides what you will have and prepares it for you. You are there from selection to the provision of the item.
- The ingredients are of fine quality (and often locally sourced).
Going back to go forward.

The future of luxury is about looking back. Tailors who suited generations of families and made alterations to Grandfather’s suit that the son is now wearing. The shirt maker replacing the collars and cuffs. The shoe-maker who refurbishes your shoes and has a set of lasts with your name on, for when he has to make a new set. Getting measured, having your foot cast for a last or getting your watch could be memorable events once again. So there this a precedence for expertise and service levels. But it implies a retail experience that will change dramatically.

New techniques and questions.

Previously with the exception of measuring sessions, these processes were largely concealed from the consumer and were difficult to scale. So it’s worthwhile thinking about how luxury’s omakase future could be extended with modern technology? We have some experiments that might give us some ideas. First up, L’Oreal has showcased bespoke make-up manufacture for a while.

How could high-end perfume makers adapt for products beyond make-up? Improved analysis equipment from the likes of Oxford Nanopore could facilitate individually formulated fragrance products based on skin chemistry.

Adidas experimented with its Speedfactory concept that blended the retail and shoe assembly together.

Technologically there is a lot of promising ideas. Adidas have worked with up-cycled plastics retrieved from the debris brought together by an ocean gyre made into 3d printed soles and fibres. (Look for the Parley label, who Adidas partnered with on this.)

How can additive or automated manufacturing and other processes feel luxe? In what way could they add to the theatre?

This hybridisation of retail and manufacturing changes the nature of both offline and online retail completely. Would even the largest concession in Selfridges or a shopping mall be big enough, or would fashion houses need a single purpose brand experience?

Given that there is likely to be a bit more time between manufacture and presentation of the product than there would be in a sashimi restaurant, what else would go into the maison experience? LVMH is already investing in hotels and resorts like Cheval Blanc which gives it a better understanding of more areas in luxury experience and service.

Localisation would likely to be needed to handle omakase and luxury due to culture and the need for local materials. This might include new materials, such as fungus-derived leather. Of course, this might have negative implications for luxury house supply chains, whether it’s Louis Vuitton’s iconic plastic coated leather, or the Hermés crocodile farm.

Which means that product line-ups could no longer be global in nature. So luxury companies may revisit that the creative process looks like. Should there be a single global vision anymore? Luxury maisons instincts would be to say yes, but could this be an opportunity to own local ateliers in markets like China or the US?
- Will there be more local brands instead?
- What will a maison’s heritage mean in the future? A luxury maison is about what remains the same as much as what changes. What will happen to long-standing motifs?
- Will there be a greater opportunity for more auteurs who are closer to the customers?
- How to bridge the tension in terms of choosing for the customer and creativity as well as quality?
We’re talking a very different profile of creative in terms of thinking, attitudes and skills compared to the present.

Service, repair and reuse could learn a lot lessons from traditional tailors and the service networks of watchmakers like Rolex or luggage maker Rimowa.

I could not think of a more exciting or scary time to be setting the brand direction for a luxury maison, let alone the overall direction or the likes of LVMH. But by wrapping local materials, expertise, ritual and a bit of theatre the future could look like a fusion of omakase and luxury.

More information
April 30, 2024