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.
For some brands sponsorships aid in research and product development, motorsport and mountaineering are two sports where this the case. Other sponsorship deals, for instance college athletes and premier league footballers depend on the individuals effect as an influencer as much as their role on pitch. All of these complexities will affect the perception of the sponsorship value and effectiveness. Sponsorship being unmanaged and unmeasured isn’t a new phenomenon. – Sponsorship ‘unmanaged and unmeasured’, WFA warns – The Media Leader. Shirt sponsors are basically dependent on the amount of time on screen. Sponsoring celebrities like Jackie Chan is more about attracting eyeballs to the companies advertising campaigns.
(Jackie Chan represents a particular problem in this sector of sponsorship because he represented over 12 brands at the same time. From local companies that made game consoles suspiciously similar to Nintendo systems to Japanese multi-nationals Canon and Mitsubishi.)
Part of this focus on sponsorship measurement might be about the culture change digital advertising created: How the digital revolution led to a greater justification for advertising – The Media Leader. Famously, telecoms executives love of particular sports influenced sponsorship programmes of their companies. Sir Peter Bonfield was a keen sailor and BT sponsored the Global Challenge yacht race series.
Sir Chris Gent, over at Vodafone was a big cricket fan. The sponsorship would have been difficult to measure as a lot of the impact would have been in cementing existing relationships and facilitating new ones through corporate entertainment. With both, there would be some efforts to demonstrate the relevance of the sponsorship, but it was very much putting the cart before the horse.
Grateful Dead x Stundenglass Bong | Esquire – yes the Grateful Dead now have an official bong for resale, but the author’s deadhead memories are the thing to read on this article
Louis Vuitton is selling a €6,000 digital mini trunk by Nicolas Ghesquière | Vogue Business – Louis Vuitton is selling a €6,000 digital mini trunk by Nicolas Ghesquière. The next product available to LV’s exclusive group of NFT holders is a mini trunk bag designed by the brand’s women’s artistic director. Only 200 are available, and the physical will land in March.
I had used SCART for a long time. The large parallel port plugs and stiff coaxial cables that looked as if they were limbs that had fallen of a cyberpunk twisted oak, were just part of the living room. Even if you hadn’t looked behind the TV cabinet, you maybe seen them as part of the flight cased TV and laser disc combo back when karaoke first took off as an activity in your local pub. Or the connection between a pub’s TV for Sky Sports and the set-top box held up high on the pub wall for punters to enjoy the game with their drink.
That was up until their replacement by HDMI cables, TOSLINK and ethernet cables in my home TV set-up over the past ten years. SCART was actually the name of the French radio and television makers association who developed the standard back in the mid-1970s. SCART came along as TVs were becoming more reliable and one started to see the decline of the TV rental market.
My parents first TV that they bought in the UK was a HMV-branded set with glowing vacuum tubes in the back despite a relatively modern looking TV case with push buttons similar to this one. SCART came along just a few years later.
A lot of the SCART features assumed that consumers would move to larger TVs with better displays and sound that would come to dominate the living room of European homes. And they were right, though through much of the 1980s many homes still had a 13″ colour portable TV.
SCART became compulsory for televisions sold in France from 1980 onwards. The standard was sufficiently robust and scalable for it to be used in transmitting 1080p high definition video as HDMI came to prominence. France eventually revoked their compulsory adoption of SCART in 2015.
Things that we take as standard on HDMI like using the VCR, set-top box or disc player to turn on the TV, were also standard on SCART from the late 1970s. You could daisy chain equipment together, which was important for people who were early adopters of satellite receivers, cable TV boxes and laser disc players.
SCART came at a time when globalisation moved the gravity of consumer electronics further east. First to Japan, then Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Malaysia and eventually China. Brands like Philips, Grundig, Nokia, Nordmende, Thomson and Ferguson were swept to the side by likes of Sony, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Sharp, LG and Samsung.
The SCART socket and plug were clever designs. You could only put them in the right way around and for something with 21 pins in they were not only robust but easy to plug and plug out again. Though once you had a SCART connection set up, you left it well alone.
China’s property crisis is stirring protests across the country – Nikkei Asia – Around 50 to 70 demonstrations are now occurring monthly, though August saw about 100 worker-led protests, three times as many as the same month a year earlier. Since June 2022, demonstrations have occurred in 276 cities nationwide. The protests have been somewhat concentrated in wealthier cities, particularly Shenzhen, Xi’an and Zhengzhou, and together have involved tens of thousands of people.
How Liverpool’s legendary Club 051 was brought back from the brink of demolition – Features – Mixmag – “The nightclub in itself is a thing of the past,” he continues. “Most of the stuff people class as nightclubs now are bars or bar-restaraunts that have DJs playing in there and it’s booze culture. There is industrial clubs, especially in London – but in Liverpool, there isn’t really any.” It’s difficult to disagree with Lee, being in this space with its pillars and it’s expansive-yet-intimate atmosphere feels markedly different to being in the kind of modern venues that tend to be of a similar capacity in the UK — converted warehouses and industrial spaces, with a routine approach of sticking decks and the end of the room alongside the soundsystem and a bar at the back
Design
Language Log » Eddie Bauer – young people either can’t read or don’t want cursive fonts according to this Eddie Bauer rebrand
Case Study | Fashion’s New Rules For Sports Marketing | BoF – When the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games begin in July 2024, LVMH brands will have a significant presence. Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Berluti will design uniforms and Chaumet will create the medals. This is the first time LVMH will sponsor individual athletes. This “premium” partnership highlights the growing importance of sports to the fashion industry.
Survey reveals surprising age trend among paid subscribers of electronic comics in Japan | SoraNews24 – an Internet survey conducted by Oricon ME between May 17 and June 7 of this year revealed. According to 10,438 e-comic reader respondents between the ages of 15-79 who read e-comics at least once per week, the age demographic that subscribed most frequently for these services, at 50.5 percent, was those in their 50s. Conversely, the age group that subscribed least frequently, at 6.2 percent, was those between 10 to 19 years old.
Israel Arms the World’s Autocrats—With Weapons Tested on Palestinians | The New Republic – “It’s either the civil rights in some country or Israel’s right to exist,” said Eli Pinko, the former head of Israel’s Defense Export Control Agency, in 2021. “I would like to see each of you face this dilemma and say: ‘No, we will champion human rights in the other country.’” Under this ethos, the Israeli economy quickly “abandoned oranges for hand grenades,” as one critic memorably quipped. After the Six-Day War in 1967, when the 19-year-old nation launched a preemptive strike on its neighbors—taking over the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights—a new era in Israeli politics began
The Russian Way of War | Foreign Affairs – Russia has long been home to creative thinking in both conventional and nonconventional warfare. In the conventional arena, during the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet military thinkers generated novel ideas such as the concept of deep battle—breaking through enemy lines and creating a continuous moving front. These ideas shaped, and continue to shape, NATO thinking. In the unconventional space, Soviet influence was even more profound. From its founding days, Soviet leaders developed a body of ideas and practices about subversive conflict, including forging documents, co-opting agents abroad, and establishing disinformation campaigns. An early example was the groundbreaking Operation Trest. Carried out in the 1920s, Trest operatives established fictitious underground political cells in Europe in the 1920s to infiltrate anti-Bolshevik groups and lure their members back to the Soviet Union.
Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records | WIRED – The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure—a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States. In a letter to US attorney general Merrick Garland on Sunday, Wyden wrote that he had “serious concerns about the legality” of the DAS program, adding that “troubling information” he’d received “would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress.” That information, which Wyden says the DOJ confidentially provided to him, is considered “sensitive but unclassified”
Walmart has built over 100 Walmart store of the future designs. Some of the elements seek emulate the best bits of Target with seasonal low priced items close to the door and a more experiential approach to merchandising.
Mike Mozart
Some of the other changes in the Walmart store of the future include QRcodes on signage and a Walmart smartphone app for self-checkout show a blending of real world and digital, or as we like to call it here, the web of no web.
CIA director William Burns
CIA William Burns gave this wide ranging talk in February 2023. It seems apropos to share it here. Burns was involved in the Middle East before and through much of GWoT (global war on terror). Burns commentary on the Middle East at the time is very much worthwhile about thinking about now. Burns’ book The Back Channel was frank about his failings as well as successes when it was published back in 2021.
Burns handled the Ukraine conflict particularly well in the early stages. His comments on Israel and Palestine look particularly prophetic now, even though western intelligence agencies were shocked by what happened on October 7, 2023.
I’m sorry to be so uplifting today about the international landscape, and I also have to say that, you know, in the conversations I had with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, you know, I think it left me quite concerned about the prospects for even greater fragility and even greater violence between Israelis and Palestinians as well. You know, I was, as Barbara mentioned, a senior U.S. Diplomat 20 years ago during the Second Intifada, and I’m concerned, as are my colleagues in the intelligence community, the lot of what we’re seeing today has a very unhappy resemblance to some of those realities that we saw then too.
William J Burns
Operation Shady RAT
How an experimental honey pot simulating computerised industrial systems reveal the long term hacking programme done by APT 1 for the Chinese government. The RAT in question was a ‘remote access trojan’ piece of malware.
Irish radio broadcasting
RTÉ, the Irish public broadcaster started broadcasting radio programmes in 1926. At the time it was called 2RN, it became by Radio Athlone, which was eventually called Radio Éireann in 1938. The ‘T’ came in after to the first television broadcasts in 1961.
RTÉ was central to my identity as an Irishman spending a good deal of my childhood in Britain – my culture, language and literature came through the speakers. The programmes now conveyed online offer my parents an information lifeline to everything happening at home since the long wave and medium wave radio services were shut down. This documentary from 2001 reflects one the first 75 years of Irish radio broadcasting.
Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott: The Canceling of the American Mind
Talk at the Churchill Club of California about their book The Cancelling of the American Mind. It is interesting hear Rikki Schlott reference The Coddling of The American Mind, which Lukianoff co-wrote with Jonathan Haidt. In Cancelling the authors look to document some of the failings in how cancel culture works on campus and in the workplace. It is much more of a partisan work than Coddling, mainly because it driven by Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The comparison to the red scare of the 1950s are interesting.
China’s rule is described by the German government as guided by ideology. Germany has pulled away from its historic strategy due to China’s approach being guided by ideology. The classification of systemic rival due to China’s guided by ideology approach sets the German government against pro-China businesses including BASF, Daimler-Benz, Deutsche Telekom and Volkswagen Group.
Chinese acquisitions of German specialist companies have been guided by ideology as much as business benefit. Germany let go critical companies like Kuka – the robotics specialist to specialist construction equipment.
Sentiment in the Mittelstand industrial base of Germany has turned negative as China’s rule became increasingly guided by ideology.
Apple discriminated against US citizens in hiring, DOJ says | Ars Technica – investigation “found that Apple engaged in a pattern or practice of citizenship status discrimination in recruitment for positions it hired through PERM, and that the company’s unlawful discrimination prejudiced US citizens, US nationals, lawful permanent residents, and those granted asylum or refugee status. These less effective recruitment practices deterred protected workers from applying to positions that Apple preferred to fill instead with PERM beneficiaries.” Apple did not advertise PERM positions on its external job website like it does with other positions, the DOJ said. “It also required all PERM position applicants to mail paper applications, even though the company permitted electronic applications for other positions,” the DOJ said. – Bob Cringely had been talking about similar antics at IBM for years. I expect that you will see this across the technology sector
Alstom: the French train giant battling to stay on the rails – “If Alstom had a problem, the whole of France would find itself pretty stuck,” given the company supplies most of the country’s trains and metros, said an executive at a rival manufacturer. “It can pose a major industrial risk.”
Klick Wire | Telehealth top app type for 45+ – it all comes down to how you define telehealth and how app versus ‘system’ usage is measured. I would imagine alarm and SMS / messaging would still rank very high
Hong Kong
Hong Kong man wanted over fatal hold-up shooting arrested after 32 years on the run | South China Morning Post – its like a vintage Chow Yun Fat film, but in real life. In the years running up to recolonisation there were a lot of armed robbers perpetrated by mainlanders who would come in do the job and return. These jobs often used AK pattern weapons, apparently from China but just as likely left over from the wars that ravaged South East Asia
How Israel’s spymasters misread Hamas | FT – before Hamas launched its October 7 attack, Avi Issacharoff, co-creator of Israel’s hit television thriller Fauda, rejected a possible plotline for one episode in which Hamas fighters stormed the border fence and attacked Israel, deeming it too implausible. Israel’s security services apparently thought the same.
Old money style has been a pre-occupation behind the recent fascination with quiet luxury a la Zegna and Loro Piana.
Loro Piana advertising
The fascination with old money style isn’t new. Streetwear brands and hip-hop culture borrowed from preppy style over the years. Brands like Stüssy, A Bathing Ape, Phat Farm and Sean Jean had pieces that aped preppiness – a second old money style. Prior to Phat Farm, Ralph Lauren had trodden the same path and it inspired ‘Dad style’ in Japan.
Barbour jackets moved off the grouse moors and on to the backs of yuppies in the 1980s and 1990s UK – an urban preoccupation that is still maintained today.
Normcore is the practice of wearing great fashion basics that aren’t heavily branded. More related content can be found here and here.
Harry Farrell and Abraham Newman on the weaponisation of the global financial and trade system highlighted in their book Underground Empire. If I had one criticism it would be viewing this purely as an American trait. A classic example would be Chinese policies (cyber-sovereignty, shadow trade sanctions, coerced technology transfer), Russian food terrorism or EU sanctions on Russia.
Bill Gates feels Generative AI has plateaued, says GPT-5 will not be any better | Technology News – The Indian Express – Gates also predicted that in the next two to five years, the accuracy of AI software will witness a considerable increase along with a reduction in cost. This will lead to the creation of new and reliable applications. Interestingly, he also said that he anticipates a stagnation in development initially. The billionaire said that, with GPT-4, the company has reached a limit, and he does not feel that GPT-5 will be better than its predecessor.
