Ged Carroll

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  • Ultra deep watch + more things

    OMEGA SEAMASTER PLANET OCEAN ULTRA DEEP | Watches News – I love some of the design details in this Planet Ocean Ultra Deep such as the lugs. I was less convinced by the aesthetics of the dial, the hands and the lack of protection given to the crown on the Planet Ocean Ultra Deep. More on design here.

    So, Gutenberg Didn’t Actually Invent the Printing Press | Literary Hub – way before Samsung Korea was innovating the shit out of the world, here’s the story

    The Redirect Method – its rare to get this much of an inside view inside a campaign, well worth reading

    NHS teams up with Amazon to bring Alexa to patients | Society | The Guardian – the push here seems to be accessibility; but a call centre is even more responsive than Alexa is

    Shiseido’s Beauty App Promises Perfect Skin — at $92 a Month – Bloomberg – Shiseido is targeting women facing “the dilemma of valuing skincare but struggling to find the time to find the perfect formula,” Shigekazu Sugiyama, president of Shiseido Japan, said at a news conference in Tokyo. Research by the company shows that the more hectic the lifestyle, the greater the fluctuation seen in complexion, he said. 

    Optune’s cylindrical device mixes and dispenses a personalized formula twice a day, with as many as 80,000 different combinations. The product’s software, available as an iPhone app, takes photos of the user’s face in order to detect skin conditions. The data is analyzed together with sleep rhythms and menstrual cycles, as well as external factors such as weather and air pollution, in order to deliver the right mix of serums.

    Unilever tackles marketing bias with DNA tests | WARC – The exposed group who perused their personal DNA results and participated in the immersive training recorded a 35% decrease in unconscious stereotyping when measured against the control group. 

    Similarly, Santos revealed, the exposed group also logged a 27% increase in original thinking measured against their peers in the control group. 

    Such an insight builds on a growing slate of evidence that the part of the brain associated with stereotyping influences the cognitive activities that are needed for creativity, too.

    Podcast: WARC’s David Tiltman On Marketing Effectiveness – great listening for the lunch hour on advertising effectiveness

    Nomads travel to America’s Walmarts to stock Amazon’s shelves – The Verge – “If somebody likes a certain scent or how something works, they become loyal to that item, even if just the packaging has changed. They can no longer find that item in a store, and Amazon is one place they’ll look for it. It’s people like us who travel around that can find it.”

    Mediatel: Newsline: The scourge of short-termism comes from the top – “The Media sector has several examples of companies that placed short-term earnings growth over long-term investment and saw their earnings and, ironically, share price suffer. RELX (the old Reed Elsevier) suffered a collapse in its share price, which took several years to reverse, after the market realised previous management had underinvested to boost earnings growth to meet LTIP plans. On the other hand, companies that invest see returns to shareholders. Sky, which famously prioritised organic investment over shareholder returns and meeting earnings targets, eventually was bought out at a big premium to its historic share price”.

    How 5G will affect marketing communications | Advertising | Campaign Asia – so adtech will slow up the theoretical speed of 5G, this is all very depressing

  • To lose a child & things from last week

    Amazing Singaporean content on what its like to lose a child. The pain and anguish of the parents talking about what its like to lose a child comes through. Time doesn’t seem to be the healer when it comes to The questions were a very powerful device to get across this story.

    Hong Kong bakery’s ‘anti-extradition bill’ mooncakes and cookies leave customers hungry for more | South China Morning Post – given that grandparents often hold more pro-establishment views than their children and grand children I can imagine that this likely to make for very tense mid-Autumn festival celebrations

    Nor “Pheonix” Diana is the first hijab wearing Malay women’s wrestler. Japan’s heritage in wrestling has encouraged interest in the sport throughout Asia. The exception to the rule would be China, where despite the efforts of WWE and domestic entrepreneurs, they haven’t managed to make wrestling work in the marketplace. The other protagonist in this video Zeda Zhang (real name Julie Ho) is an MMA artist and pro-wrestler. She was taken on by WWE when they were looking to crack the China market and let go when those plans fell apart for various reasons.

    Yunying Huang challenges the Eurocentric perception of techno-culture in China | It’s Nice That – think Chinese meme culture and cyberpunk dropped in a Blendmatic 5000. China has its own fascinating takes on sci-fi so Yunying Huang’s work makes complete sense. With the exception of Cixin Liu, little has been done to bring Chinese science fiction to a wider audience, in the same way that happened with Japanese cyber punk in the 1980s.

    Amazing video from SamBakZa – Korean ska. You can see There She Is here. Besides the carefully manufactured K-pop acts Korea also has a thriving music scene from dance music to indie-rock. But SamBakZa is the first ska artist that I know out of Korea. Its understandable given the cross pollination that happens between Japanese and Korean music trends.

    https://youtu.be/-uqnKQwwcJo

  • Sohu returns + more news

    Can Chinese internet pioneer Sohu finally pull off a comeback after missing the mobile era? | SCMP.com – Sohu making a comeback has interesting parallels with Yahoo! in the west, but without the incompetent board and Carl Icahn. I suspect that the rejuvenation of Sohu will be a fruitless task as the internet doesn’t give second chances

    Anti-China Bonds Between Hong Kong and Taiwan Are Growing – The Atlantic – The year was 1984: China was in the early days of its economic rise and was experiencing one of its most politically free periods under Communist rule; Hong Kong was the booming financial hub and crown jewel of what remained of the British Empire; and then there was Taiwan, which was nearing the end of nearly four decades of brutal martial law. At the time, if you had wagered on which of those places would be the freest 35 years later, Taiwan would have had long odds…

    Huawei, the CSSA and beyond: “Latent networks” and Party influence within Chinese institutions – Asia Dialogue – well worth reading. It’s worthwhile treating United Front organisations and organisations like the CSSA as enemy agents. Not that all the members are hellbent on destruction of the west; but the Chinese government wields them in a similar way to the Soviet Union using trade unions and protest groups in the past

    WSJ City | Huawei dispute US cyber firms findings of flaws in its gear – but the findings mirror similar issues found by GCHQ that Huawei said could take years to correct

    Is Apple dead creatively? Campaign – I couldn’t have imagined Campaign asking this question even five years ago

    Mark Ritson: 5G is the latest hot topic on the bullsh*t roadshow | Marketing Week – yep that sounds about right (paywall)

    Music on the Move: Sony’s Walkman Turns 40 | Nippon.com – wonderful walk through Sony’s product history and cultural impact. More Sony related content here.

  • Mulan live action trailer & things that made the week

    Mulan live action film trailer

    Disney posted this beautiful trailer of the Mulan live action adaption this weekend. I presume it was to try and take the sting out of a black mermaid earlier this week on Chinese social media. The Mulan live action film will have to meet the exacting standards of fans who loved the animated version of Mulan and avoid communist party imbued fascism

    McDonalds bacon rolls

    Kudos to my former work neighbours at Leo Burnett London for this lovely bit of craft in a McDonald’s UK ad for bacon rolls

    40th anniversary of Sony Walkman

    Sony have been celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Walkman. There used to be a lovely museum of Sony gear through the ages that was not only great to behold; but an education in product design. Anyway check out this short Sony video of Walkmans

    Doxxed colonial policemen

    I’ve been following the ongoing events in Hong Kong with interest. It seems that the Labour Party proved to be more effective than the government in striking out for the Hong Kong people. Shadow minister Helen Goodman doxed one of three British expat senior policemen who were involved in the harshest Hong Kong police action to date on June 12. The Times newspaper published the names of the other two officers Rupert Dover and David Jordan. Their identity had appeared on Hong Kong protest banners after June 12 and were well known to the expat community.

    The June 12th tactics were more suitable for Northern Ireland during The Troubles than the kind of demos one would see in Hong Kong. Superintendent Julian Shave’s profile on LinkedIn (since removed) showed that considered himself an expert in counter-terrorism. There was nothing about his expertise in the use of tear gas against Hong Kongers.

    Given Goodman’s and the Labour Party’s stance about this, Messrs Dover, Jordan and Shave might think of looking for a job in Bahrain or China’s burgeoning private security sector, rather than risking a day in a UK court under a future Labour government…

    K-pop idol experience

    Hallyu or Korean popular culture has been on a sustained boom since the early noughties. A key part of this has been the way Korea seems to mass produce boy and girl bands in a much more consistently successful way than the likes of Japan. They even seem to do it even better than western producer dynasties like Simon Cowell, 19 Management or Stock, Aitken and Waterman. This documentary by Asian Boss is very insightful on the idol experience from an insider and how she’s pivoted into being a YouTuber

  • The Jony Ive post

    Looking back on the career of Jony Ive, its hard to believe where the company came from. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple he picked through much of Apple and didn’t like what he saw. He did see something in Jonathan Ive and the small cadre of product designers left at Apple.

    Meine neue Bettlektüre. Jony Ive.

    Ive’s moving on from Apple some 27 years after he joined is a long innings. During that time Apple went from having a near death experience as a computer maker to selling luxury goods.

    Whilst Ive is one of the world’s best known product designers; he has had his fair share of failed products.

    • The Apple Cube
    • The Newton MessagePad 110

    I consider Ive’s body fo work as head of design at Apple to break down into three periods:

    The Candy Age

    ‘The Candy Age’ was about putting fun back into computers like the iMac. It was a break from Apple’s previous pseudo corporate product design such as the platinum or ‘Snow White’ design language. Around this time you had big organic forms that CAD and tough polycarbonate plastics made possible. From Silicon Graphics Octane and O2 workstations to retro styled Smeg fridges; fun was in.

    The Jony Ive led design team took the transparent prototypes that were usually used to see how products go together and look for things like pinched cables into production. This made a virtue of the innards.

    This provided clear differentiation between Apple and beige box PCs whilst still providing out of the box functionality of an internet appliance. It was this mix of timing and plug-and-play functionality that drove iMac and iBook sales as much as product design.

    This was when Apple started to move from being a ‘weird’ platform to a cool platform.

    Speaking of cool, Jobs pushed both the engineering and design team to keep the amount of cool fans in the devices to a minimum to reduce device noise.

    Pseudo Bauhaus

    Apple started to go from coloured translucent polycarbonate to white polycarbonate and metal. You see this in the second iteration of the iBook which went from looking like a funky toilet seat to a a clean white laptop design. The last generation PowerBooks and early MacBooks in aluminium alloys where a premium version. It gave use the iconic iPod earphones and the early iPod classic designs.

    There was a move to recto-linear shapes and details that were a nod to Dieter Rams work at Braun. During this time Ive was interviewed for the documentary Objectified and specifically stated that their products looked to embrace Rams’ ten rules of good design.

    Size Zero

    Apple was obsessed with size. There is an apocryphal story about Steve Jobs dropping a prototype iPod into a fish tank. He noticed that air bubbles came out of the case. Jobs jumped on this as proof that there was wasted internal space. What this story missed is the emphasis Jobs put on thermal performance.

    Motorola came out with two products in 2004 and 2005. One was the PEBL. The phone was rounded and smooth like a pebble – a tactile pleasure. The second was the RAZR, a phone that was broad and really thin for a feature phone. The RAZR was the more successful.

    We know that Jobs used the RAZR, he pulled his phone out on stage. You can see the influence of the RAZR in slim devices like the iPhone, the MacBook Air and the iPad.

    If Apple couldn’t make it thin, they made it small. That’s the reason why Apple went with the ‘waste paper bin’ Mac Book Pro. Being circular also cut interconnect distances in theory.

    The problem with size zero is that Apple designed itself into a corner:

    • Thermal management became an issue. As I write this my MacBook Pro is blowing up a hurricane. Apple’s Mac Pro line had to be redesigned from the ground up because the ‘waste paper basket’ design couldn’t handle the heat dissipation required for major machines
    • Minimalism to the point of commodisation. Because Ive reduced the phone down to resembling a thick sheet of class, it meant that differentiation through industrial design didn’t matter. Hence why its really hard to tell one phone from another
    • Environmental impact and repairability. Apple has to use special robots to disassemble iPhones for recycling. Apple AirPods are unrepairable and professional grade laptops can’t be upgraded post-purchase. On the MacBook Pro you have ultra slim keyboard keys that are intolerant of use

    Jony Ive leaves a mixed legacy behind at Apple. His departure gives the design team an opportunity to push the reset button and come up with a new design language for products moving forwards.