Ged Carroll

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:

  1. It is innovative
  2. It makes a product useful
  3. It is aesthetic
  4. It makes a product understandable
  5. It is unobtrusive
  6. It is honest
  7. It is long-lasting
  8. It is thorough down to the last detail
  9. It is environmentally-friendly – it can and must maintain its contribution towards protecting and sustaining the environment.
  10. 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.

  • Samsung and de GRISOGONO + more

    Samsung and de GRISOGONO Make Baselworld Tick to Luxury Smart Time | Samsung Newsroom – a bit crass looking. Samsung and de GRISOGONO follows on from past luxury deals that Samsung and LG have done with brands like Prada. Those deals were just brand engineering to ‘premiumise’ phones – a bit like Huawei’s deal with Porsche Design now. It will be interesting to see if Samsung and de GRISOGONO come up with something that meets the needs of both brands

    Technology Isn’t Enough to Empower Employees, Even in a Digital World | HBR – CIOs and business managers are lagging – yep, sounds about right

    E-commerce Gets Its Own Consumer Price Index | FastCompany – at first blush this looks like a PR stunt, however if it isn’t and market analysts pick it up, it could be very interesting

    Here are the winners and losers of an Instagram algorithm | Digiday – Instagram moving from a stream to algorithm is inevitable, but changes the game

    Ferragamo works to stall Chinese counterfeiting with RFID microchip technology | Luxury Daily – a step up from the usual hologram

    Here’s why ‘Straight Outta Compton’ had different Facebook trailers for people of different races – just wow

    Waffle – Social Media – Android Apps on Google Play – not sure that there is a market for them, particularly in the face of well entrenched domestic Korean and international competition

    Julie Rubicon – interesting bit of Facebook Analytics based fiction

    Apple reveals new details of data centres in China – FT.com – Apple received requests from the Chinese government for data on more than 4,000 devices during the first half of last year, and complied with three-quarters of the requests. By comparison, Apple received more than 9,000 requests from the US during the same period.

    Facebook News Feed – Our goal with News Feed is to show you the stories that matter most to you every time you visit Facebook. – nicely done

    Metronome Card in Google Search – I love this Google hack

    Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing | WIRED – interview from 1996 when Jobs was pimping WebObjects (NeXT’s great web development software platform)

    China Criticizes Subsidized Ride-Hailing Apps As Anti-Competitive – Slashdot – expect Uber in court at some point soon

    Ransomware: Chinese Hackers belived to be responsible for some attacks | BGR – the interesting thing about this is how ‘cyber weapons’ – the tools these hackers are using have effortlessly moved from the government to private sector. Something to think about with backdoor techniques etc

    Hong Kong Police hunt for social gurus to deepen their online presence | Marketing Interactive – they’ve hit a couple of off-notes in their social presence on Facebook, good to see that they’re looking to address it

    Financial Cryptography 2016 | Light Blue Touchpaper – great live blog of event

    Closer ties ‘will benefit not hinder’ Hong Kong: top Chinese official lashes Moody’s credit downgrade | South China Morning Post – not really much ‘how it will benefit’ in this response more knee jerk rhetoric – letting the story get away from them

    Peerio – interesting encrypted messaging platform with cloud message storage. I have no idea what their business model is though

    Twitter has changed. Get over it | The Drum – its about the passive audiences consuming tweets on and off network (like Siri). Reminds me a lot of Weibo consumer behaviour. The question is whether the shareholder sentiment will tear things up – which is where I was thinking when I wrote – The Trouble With Twitter

    Step-by-step guide: Switch from Evernote to OneNote without losing a thing | SiliconAngle – interesting that Microsoft is going after Evernote

    A New Weapon for Battling Cellphones in Theaters: Laser Beams | NYTimes.com – laser pointers have been used for years as disciplinary devices at many of China’s leading performance halls, including the National Center, the Shanghai Oriental Art Center and the Shanghai Grand Theater. (paywall)

    Deutsche Telekom takes aim at AWS with launch of new public cloud service | TelecomTV – Huawei components in a European cloud or an American cloud that’s insecure by FBI design? For many a tough call

    Optics See 56G Demos at OFC | EE Times – working to define requirements for 56Gbps electrical interfaces over various electrical reaches with multiple modulations to enable the next generations of data communications equipment.  Today’s growing array of computing and communications applications drives the need for multiple electrical interfaces that optimize latency, reach, power, cost, etc.

    Smart Glasses May Replace Smartphones | EE Times – according to the Game Developers Conference at least

    Quoted: Anonymous calls for ‘total war’ against Donald Trump | SiliconBeat – it kicks off on April 1, 2016

    Here Maps drops support for Windows Phone and Windows 10 | The Verge – this doesn’t mean that Microsoft won’t cook something up itself based on HERE data

    Why YouTube Is a More Important Platform Than Snapchat for Luxury Brands | Adweek – it makes sense for telling longer luxury heritage stories and providing immersive experiences

    Using Neuroscience to explore How Advertising Works: Building Brands in the Brain by Fuguitt and Stipp for The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) (PDF)

    IBM iX global leader Paul Papas interview – For two years running, IBM’s Interactive Experience (iX) division has been named the largest digital-agency network in the world

    Strong encryption, weak encryption, plus Obama on finding ‘balance’ | SiliconBeat – Fatemeh Khatibloo, an analyst for Forrester Research who focuses on privacy, told SiliconBeat in an email Monday that “the seemingly rational case made by the president simply doesn’t square with reality.”

  • Platform utility

    Silicon Valley VC Andreessen Horowitz put togethers slides that cover platform utility and the role of network effects. The  presentation does a good job at providing a taxonomy on different products. It comes in handy when thinking about channel role / platform utility from a media planning perspective and also evaluating start-up ideas. They define platform in terms of development, but for advertisers we can think of it wider as we are likely to be making API calls in terms of data, targeting and ad placement. It is something that we are building demand or brand equity on.

    Key takeouts from the presentation

    • A network effect occurs when a product or service becomes more valuable to users as more people use it

    Network effect benefits

    • Create barriers to exit for existing users
    • Create barriers to entry for new companies
    • Protect from competitors eating away at margins
    • Creates a winner takes all style market

    Communications networks laws that provide indicators likely platform utility

    • Sarnoff’s law – the value of a network is proportional to the number of viewers
    • Metcalfe’s law – the value of a network is proportional to the square of number of connected users
    • Reed’s law – value of a group forming network is proportional to the number and ease with which groups form within it (subgroups grow faster than sheer number of P2P participants

    If it isn’t clear where they fall within these networks, it’s a warning flag for brands on whether to invest in the platform.

    User modes

    • Single ‘player’ mode – the product has immediate utility for a single user. Examples would be Flickr in the early days for photo storage, Foursquare in the early days to bookmark places you’d been to as a locative memory. Social bookmarking sites like Pinboard, or Delicious would have been in here had it not been retired
    • ‘Multiplayer’ mode – the product has no utility for a single user. This is particularly true for communications products. Examples would be Viber, Skype, Slack, Zoom etc.
    • Products can be both single player and multiplayer. So the community that built around Flickr for example.
    • Single player is more powerful when accompanied by an initial tactic to drive early network growth. Instagram photo filters was a way to post pictures on Twitter before there was enough critical mass. They help with adoption in the early days of a product when network effects aren’t sufficiently strong yet.
    • What’s the initial growth lever or tactic that will get it to scale?

    Case studies

    • Facebook found that connecting a new user to 10 friends within 14 days of sign-up was key to improving retention
    • Focus on daily usage (habit building) to help grow network. Focus on engagement rather than just overall number growth
    • Growth usage, even as user numbers grow is a sure sign of network effects at work
    • Facebook took a clustered approach: Harvard, then Stanford and eventually other universities in the US and abroad. Rather than focusing on growth. The immediate ‘single player’ utility they offered was an online school directory
    • WhatsApp had a different network type to Facebook. Each WhatsApp user had about 20 connections compared to approximately 980 friends on Facebook. Fewer connections also meant clustering around family, close friends of interest based WhatsApp groups with more engagement
    • AirBnB had two sides of their network. More hosts attract more guests and even become guests themselves. More guests means more business and money for hosts
    • Medium found that ‘single player mode’ can help get to ‘multiplayer mode’ through building sufficient critical mass.

  • Facebook messenger content + more

    Next Up: Facebook Messenger Content From Publishers? – will Facebook Messenger content as publishing platform happen? WeChat has already got a mature content platform offering. This provides a clear framework for how Facebook Messenger content could look and feel. A bigger challenge for publishers and Facebook is how to monetise it

    SMARTPHONES: Dakele Becomes First Smartphone Victim – Bottom line: The closure of small smartphone maker Dakele marks the latest distress signal from the sector, with one or more larger, more familiar brands likely to close shop within the next 6 months. Component makers have already gone under

    BMW Group THE NEXT 100 YEARS | BMW Pressclub Global – intersting concepts and ideas

    Facebook pulls demand-side platform from Atlas – Business Insider – bots and bad quality adverts

    Why “Go Viral” Is Not An Effective Content Marketing Strategy | Marketingland – bookmark this article, share it with colleagues, peers and clients

    WPP Reports 5.3% 2015 Organic Revenue Growth | MediaPost – By comparison, Interpublic reported 6.1% organic revenue growth for 2015, while Omnicom Group reported 5.3% and Publicis Groupe reported 1.5%

    How China’s rich shape national policymaking | The Japan Times – Prime Minister Li Keqiang, as part of his report on the government’s plans and activities, announced the launch of an “Internet Plus” strategy. Insiders immediately realized who had coined that term. It was none other than Pony Ma, who had started to use that phrase beginning in 2013, based on the concepts developed by his company’s own research institute. Even though Ma is not a member of the CPC, the “paternity” of the “Internet Plus” is undeniable

    Mutual Funds Sour on Startup Investments – WSJ – feels eerily like the end of the original dot com bust

    ‘Features-as-a-service’ is changing the game for app makers – looks and feels like mash-ups did during the height of web 2.0

    Capturing the Productivity Impact of the ‘Free’ Apps and Other Online Media By Leonard Nakamura and Rachel Soloveichik – or apps haven’t driven productivity any further in the 2000s. it is especially shocking when the product gains from internet connectivity from 1995 – 2000 are considered (PDF)

    Huawei MateBook shipments expected to reach 400,000 units in 2016 | Digitises – Huawei’s MateBook 2-in-1 is expected to achieve annual shipments of 400,000 units, a lot lower than market watchers’ expectations of 1-2 million units as Huawei is mainly pushing the device in the high-end enterprise market instead of consumer segment

    UK newspaper industry: Rewriting the story – FT.com – “The Internet is very tabloid-y,” says one Fleet Street executive. “Facebook is effectively a tabloid – short, attention-grabbing pieces of information.” – (paywall)

  • Holly Herndon + more things

    Holly Herndon

    Holly Herndon and Jace Clayton in conversation. Holly and Jace are interesting characters. They are academics, at least one published book author and artists. They have explored areas such as sampling themselves and the use of machine learning in composition and sound creation.

    Holly Herndon on process is fascinating. I think this has wider implications for creative industries. It does raise question about the nature of creation itself in terms of intellectual property.

    James Lavelle

    James Lavelle on the history of Mo’Wax. These films by FACT magazine are nice. Although they miss a few things.

    Lavelle’s impact goes beyond music:

    • James Lavelle has been a taste maker, he helped popularise a lot of Japanese clothing including A Bathing Ape (BAPE) in the UK and Europe
    • Lavelle’s Unkle was more than a music brand. There was a strong focus on merchandise and clothing including the Surrender streetwear brand. The merchandise was a great product as you can see in Lavelle’s archive. You only see Surrender items come up on eBay every so often because they are so valued and highly prized by owners. The big issue seems to have been one of distribution and hype. There is no interest on the likes of StockX for these items despite the heat behind designers Futura and manufacturers Mediacom and BAPE – again distribution would have been so important for awareness

    Lavelle has managed to self destruct and reinvent himself, which is only obliquely touched upon in this footage.

    More on the history of Mo’Wax. There is more serendipity in this than this video lets on. Also Japan’s Major Force Records needs more kudos than seems to happen in this video. If you liked this it is well worthwhile checking out the

    Sleep app pivot

    How J&J Research Led From Bath-Time to a Mobile Sleep App | Digital – AdAge – fascinating story how consumer insights can dramatically shake up product development and or service design

  • Come to Singapore + more

    Come to Singapore

    Come to Singapore! The Sights (And Branding) Are Lovely | WIRED – it feels very Monocle-esque in terms of editorial style. Come to Singpore! is very different to the Conde Naste Traveller type editorial. Singapore is aiming at developing a start-up culture so targetingWired (US) readers make a good deal of sense. More Singapore related posts here.

    Decline of cyberspace

    William Gibson on the decline of cyberspace. It is fascinating in terms of how Gibson’s inspiration has evolved over time. He was reacting against genres that he didn’t want to write as much as ideas he wanted to convey. The ability to say no, is a very interesting creative process and it reminds me of an interview I saw with an Apple executive talking about why the iPod didn’t have an FM radio.

    Renault Alpine Vision

    Interesting to see Renault going back to Alpine’s sports roots with the Vision sports coupe. It is made to a similar formula to the original 1960s cars that made Alpine famous. A light, small car, a rear-mid engine placement with a highly tuned small capacity engine. Performance is viewed by the Alpine team in much more holistically with an equal focus on handling and breaking.

    Tesla Model X

    I am a sucker for well done manufacturing and process films. The first one up is from Tesla, highlighting robots working in a manufacturing cell on their X model vehicle. Tesla has had problems around areas like panel fit. I am not sure if they have resolved those quality issues, but robots should provide them with a very consistent process and higher throughput.