Blog

  • The Conveni & things from last week

    The Conveni

    Its hard to understand The Conveni without understanding Japanese retail. In Japan, 24/7 convenience stores play a similar role to what supermarkets have in the west. They do groceries, allow utility and mobile payments and provide other services like faxing or photocopying. They offer free wi-fi and air conditioning in hot weather. There are an essential part of of Japanese life and there is a ‘combini-culture’ around them. Hiroshi Fujiwara’s Fragment Design has taken a good deal of influence from combini culture for ‘The Conveni’ retail concept. It includes processed food, bandanas in sandwich packs, towels packaged like onigiri rice balls and sweat shirts in snack packets.

    conveni

    If you can’t get to Tokyo, you can still look at their e-store.

    Michael Gove famously said that with regards to Brexit people were tired of experts. Obviously discussions between men in a pub is the antithesis of expert discussions. So here is a podcast with a couple of knowledgeable people in a pub

    https://youtu.be/Sx4AF-3Rd44

    https://youtu.be/sju9laLqeCo

    Lippincott were working on a Toys R Us rebrand that the company couldn’t implement. I don’t know if design could have saved Toys R Us, but the work is really nice.

    Aphex Twin launched a new EP; there were posters around the world and a fantastic video by Weirdcore. Warning the video will affect people with epilepsy

    Egyptian Lover picks his favourite Roland TR-808 songs – amazing listening. Some of this brought me back to my early teenage years.

  • Samsung 5G + more things

    Internesting focus: Samsung 5G, machine learning and other emerging technology – Samsung pledges to invest $22B in AI, 5G and other emerging technologies – SiliconANGLEplan to invest $22 billion in emerging fields such as artificial intelligence over the next three years. The effort will be driven primarily by the conglomerate’s Samsung Electronics Co Ltd arm, which makes its popular mobile devices. Last quarter, the handset maker saw profits decline for the first time in nearly two years due to stagnating smartphone sales. Investing more in emerging technologies could help Samsung generate new growth on the long term – the Samsung 5G and machine learning problem is the Chinese government and the limitless resources it will put behind Huawei and their peers. More Samsung content here.

    Save Sarah Jeong! And Kevin Williamson, Quinn Norton, and Joy Reid Too | WIRED – my comment: I agree that Ms Jeong has a right to an opinion. She has a right to a bad day. However when she weighed into the Naomi Wu / Vice Media dispute; her contribution damaged some of the feminist and progressive viewpoints that she herself supports. As an international Wired subscriber I find it difficult to support her particularly aggressive form of American privilege. Ms Jeong used her skill in rhetoric to hide her lack of expertise in the legal and online social environment of China.

    ‘Hipster kryptonite’: will CDs ever have a resurgence? | Music | The Guardian – interesting read. I have listened to CDs and have them, but preferred to DJ with vinyl for tactile reasons. The article fails to ask whats next. We’ve got a generation coming through with Spotify with a more passive, casual relationship to music that we haven’t seen before. There has always been people who liked music but bought few if any recordings. We haven’t seen it on the scale that we see with the Spotify generation. Music becomes a utility like water, electricity or mobile data. Since music tends to be about playlists now the artist’s brand becomes less important. Festivals provide the buzz of live music for generation Spotify but they can dip in and out moving from one tent to another. They won’t support live acts in local concert halls, go to local clubs to support local DJs or have eclectic musical libraries

    The UK Top 40 will never be the same | British GQ – For a stream to qualify as a sale, it has to play for at least 30 seconds. Most listeners will abandon anything too jarringly different before then, so there’s an incentive for artists to draw on a small pool of bankable writers, producers and styles. “I call it the shit-click factor,” says Masterton. “If a record is too challenging, then people will say, ‘What’s this? It’s shit,’ and click onto the next one. There used to be room on the charts for something dynamic and exciting such as the Arctic Monkeys. I can’t see the circumstances right now where that could happen.”

    Rock is the new jazz and vinyl’s misleading revival: 5 things I’ve learned as Guardian music editor | The Guardian  – Technology has vastly increased what record companies know about listeners and their listening habits, just as it has increased what newspapers know about their readers and their reading habits. And the results of this – on both parts – can be pernicious. At our end, it’s the reason why we get complaints about endless stories about Adele and Beyoncé and Kanye West. Why do we run them? Because people read them. Whereas very few people read stories about the latest underground band we want to rave about. And in music, that knowledge has resulted in commercial music, more than ever before, being made to a formula

    Tymbals – #edge @growth – interesting online tool

    ITV joins Hollywood giants to back video streaming service for mobiles | The Guardian – ok what am I missing here, streaming services are already on mobile and also offer side loading to deal with network quality issues

    Say Hello to the New Editor | The new Gutenberg editing experience – interesting changes that will make themes less rigid

  • The Internet of Stupid Things

    The internet of stupid things is a more charitable phrase for what many consumers call the Internet of Shit. Yes lots of products can be internet enabled, but should they be? There is a mix of challenges that result in products which fall into the following two categories:

    • Products that are internet enabled but shouldn’t be – the Happy Fork or the Griffin Smart Toaster being classic examples. I found the Griffin Smart Toaster particularly disappointing as the company’s products such as the PowerMate are generally really good. It doesn’t take the greatest imagination to see how a smart toaster could even be hacked; causing a fire – hence the internet of stupid things. Why do household appliances really need to be attached to technology. Teasmades woke you up and made a mug of tea for you to have first thing. This was a product that reached peak popularity in the 1960s and 1970s – well before cloud services.
    • Products that would be benefit from tech, but shouldn’t rely on the the cloud. I’d argue that Nest would fit in this category where cloud outages could have serious impacts on the consumer. American Nest customers have had some hard winter nights when their Nest control system went down due to cloud outages. There was no off-cloud or manual control mode that the Nest devices could take advantage of.

    It is interesting to see that Li & Fung (who are famous for global supply chain management provided to western brands and retailers) are involved in this video. It is also interesting that they are taking such a proactive view on experience design education.

    The qualitative design research Li & Fung did on skiing wearables for a client – made me wonder what value do Li & Fung’s clients bring to the table. More on design here.

  • Jane Pong & things from last week

    Check out these beautiful infographics by Jane Pong. She previously worked at the South China Morning Post. Jane Pong comes up with amazing ways to visualise information in an easy-to-digest format that works equally well in print and digital. More design related content here.

    How the ideogram structure and smartphones are affecting Chinese literacy. Chinese people learn thousands of characters as part of their literacy in their own language. But unlike alphabets in languages like English or Russian; you can’t guess at a lot of words. This is especially problematic because of the tonal nature of the languages as well.

    Electronic character input tries to get around this by suggesting characters based on pinyin or character auto-prediction. This means that if you haven’t written the character in a long time, due to auto suggestion in apps, they lose handwriting muscle memory.

    Trendwatching on the future of retail. What’s coming through this is the importance of retail in terms of culture and experience as well as consumption.

    Saul Bass on Why Man Creates via Jed Hallam’s newsletter. Bass made his reputation in developing branding design for US companies from the post war years, well into the 1980s. You might not know his name, but you will recognise his work.

    Movie posters for:

    • Vertigo
    • Psycho

    Movie title sequences for:

    • Broadcast News
    • Goodfellas
    • Cape Fear
    • Casino

    His logo designs include:

    • AT&T
    • Quaker Oats
    • United Airlines
    • Warner Communications
    • General Foods

    Saul Bass’ logo designs were seen as an unusually good investment for brands. The average life of a Saul Bass logo is more than 34 years. The logo was most often retired because the company was merged or disappeared. More here.

    Ogilvy Consulting on buyer behaviour

  • Kevin King + more things

    Digital Chief Kevin King Quits Edelman After 14 Years – More recently, sources familiar with the situation also point to ongoing questions regarding the agency’s investment priorities. Famously, Edelman has hired more than 600 creatives and planners over the last three years, in a bid to better compete with agencies across the paid and earned media spectrum – I don’t know Kevin King, but I do know that he was a long term fixture at Edelman and helped build their digital capability. Kevin King will likely turn up at one of the new agency groups in the near future – Edelman non-compete clause allowing. More Edelman related content here.

    CSL on Fifa 19: not quite fantasy football but you can see why the China league is joining the EA party | South China Morning Post – unsurprising given the Chinese government’s aspirations for soccer and the domestic league. EA can’t ignore the size of gaming in China either

    Natural Cycles: ASA investigates marketing for contraception app | The Guardian – The Family Planning Association is also concerned about the app. A spokeswoman said: “The use of the word ‘certified’ suggests that there is independent evidence supporting these claims, whereas in fact the only evidence is from the company itself. It has amassed a vast database, which is very interesting, but that is not the same as verified independent evidence. – and there is the challenge of a blind faith in big data. If they get this wrong the individual consequences are huge

    The Troubled Quest for the Superconducting Wind Turbine – IEEE Spectrum – the interesting bit about about this is that in sea turbines aren’t considered instead of wind. Wind’s economics problem is their consistency, turbines are actually only doing work less than half them time – that’s the problem that’s driving size. If you put the the turbines in the water to take advantage of currents instead energy transference, more consistent power and size becomes a civil engineering problem like a dam rather than space programme style construction. How are super conductors supposed to even work?

    Britain’s Fake News Inquiry Says Facebook And Google’s Algorithms Should Be Audited By UK Regulators – if this goes through its the thin end of the wedge. The UK is much more beholden to commercial interests than even the US. The record industry the the English Premier League have managed to bring down the full force of government censorship with the Digital Economy Act. And both Facebook and Alphabet only have themselves to blame. China’s concept of cyber sovereignty starts to look prescient; and we all look as if we might be living in a darker world