Swatch have been doing some interesting things around personalisation of watch design, but Swatch and Brexit feels like a leap too far. They’ve got a really nice user experience in the web interface, which makes this a disappointing post to make. I do wonder about who they think Swatch and Brexit is actually aimed at? What other fashion or luxury brand has looked to exploit Brexit like a tawdry souvenir seller?
More Beyond campaign
Cathay Pacific – Move Beyond campaign might have passed by without a mention for me for a number of reasons.
It doesn’t say anything new, but reaffirms the Cathay Pacific that I’ve known and loved to fly with
It’s very much a campaign designed to top up brand awareness and consideration for the airline which has taken some brand knocks at home and declining awareness abroad
It’s about brand purpose, which seems to be a hygiene factor at the moment. More on that from Mark Ritson. I am not sure that Cathay Pacific’s brand purpose passes Ritson’s test of being prepared to stick with the brand purpose, even when it costs money – like when they moved away from having the Mandarin Oriental handling lounge catering…
Creatively its nice. A generic, safe looking brand film with catalogue corporate video backing track. I know Jack Scott shot it and some of the cinematography is nice (that word again), the colouring of the film is on point for money well spent. As an audience member it is pleasant enough to watch drift by, but not necessarily enough to spike a change
In fact, if it wasn’t for the MTR (Hong Kong’s equivalent of London Underground and Overground) and Hong Kong International Airport outdoor advertising it would be utterly forgettable. One of the print posters has a couple of clothed men holding hands running on a beach. An ideal compromise between a socially conservative society and western virtue signalling.
The poster wasn’t initially allowed to run on the MTR or in Hong Kong International. I heard some murmurings of China’s dark shadow casting a censoring hand on the posters – by westerners on social media. To be honest, they’d be more concerned about dealing with free speech, Falun Gong supporters, the Hong Kong independence movement rather than homosexuals being encouraged to walk on a beach in business smart suits.
Instead the reality is more mundane. A minority of Hong Kongers: Taoists, Buddhists, the non-religious and Christians alike are a bit ‘mid western American’ about the gay community. There is an obvious tension between deeply-held beliefs, the longevity of the family through children and grandchildren. Thankfully, the LGBT community and straight supporters managed to have the ban reconsidered.
William Chan Chinglish
I am guessing that Chanel has insights to show that women buy its J12 watches, whether as a gift for someone else or themselves. William Chan is an interesting brand ambassador choice in this video. There is criticism in the YouTube comments on his pronunciation and ‘Chinglish’. It also feels a bit too ‘sweet’ to me. At least he’s a good boy who loves his Mum.
Royyal Dog
Asian Boss put together this great documentary on Royyal Dog – Korea’s top graffiti artist.
Sony
Lastly I found this amazing corporate film by Sony of their corporate history that I guess was shot in the early-to-mid-1970s. The manufacturing process, in particular test and measurement being so labour intensive is fascinating. The 5 inch micro-TV set is a beautiful piece of product design, as is the early Trinitron TV set. The hi-fi equipment is achingly beautiful. Well worth watching it from start-to-finish. More Sony content here.
We think of consumption as part of the very stuff of modern life. I clear out items on eBay. My Mum and Dad have boxes of things unopened since they moved house in 1981. A lady who lived up the road who died last year had people working for five days to clear out the things she had hoarded. The house had been packed with items from ceiling to roof.
The role that consumption plays varies but taps into deep emotional ties. I felt both an emotional journey that I can only equate to grief and a certain release on getting rid of my record collection. I moved country for work and the bulk of it had to go. What was more distressing was not being able to make sure that it went to a good home at the time. It had defined me, brought me joy and latterly had been a weight that I only felt by its subsequent absence.
Consumption and identity are also intertwined.
In my pre-internet days you could get a sense of someone by visiting their sitting room or their bedroom.
What kind of books did they read?
What posters or pictures did they have?
Was there sports scarves, or signed shirts?
Family photographs
Taxidermied animals in either rural or ‘hunting, shooting or fishing’ households
What kind of videos did they have?
Where they a gamer?
What CDs, vinyl and cassettes did they have?
Did they have a system of hi-fi separates? What were the components like? Did they have headphones?
You were able to build up a picture in your head about the person, their tastes and some historic touch points.
Much of this now remains out of sight in the sitting room with the rise of cloud based services. But the picture is still here, though you will need a screen to see it.
For many people homes are a mix of the digital and the analogue. Some young people may adopt analogue items for ‘authenticity’ in their lives. For older people its the archeology of their lives. Photos not converted to digital scans. Music that had meaning or was at a certain stage in their life. Souvenirs from holidays.
If I look at my own parents:
They were more passionate about active collection of music in the 1960s before they settled down. They have finally got rid of a Philips mono turntable in plastic that hadn’t worked for years and a Sony reel to reel tape player. Both devices chosen for their luggabilty rather than quality. They had lived transcient young work lives, working away from home and living in digs
My Dad had spare time from shift work that he used to read a mix of reference books and fiction from the 1950s – the early 1980s. Since then he mostly reads caravan and crafting books
My Dad has a vast amount of tools in various states of repair that he accumulated. From when he started his apprenticeship to electronic meters bought this year
My Mum has a mix of cookery books from the 1950s to the 1990s and notebooks stuffed with clippings from magazines of recipes. In the notebooks are hand scribbled recipes that she exchanged with friends
They have carpets and stools that they crafted from kits in the 1960s before multi-channel TVs
With time, more hasn’t mean’t better ‘quality’ consumption. Technology has provided us with more reliable electronics. Unless you are a hi-fi buff you are unlikely to know about the fragility of valve electronics or the weight of discrete solid state circuits.
Globalisation has brought consumption of more ‘just good enough’ products. My parents still have some of the furniture that they bought when they got married. It isn’t Vitra or great Danish design, its mass producted items of its time. But the quality of the construction and materials contrasts with flat pack furniture bought later.
Less consumption seems to have had a number of sides to it:
More conscious choice on quality. You couldn’t just order another on Amazon
Greater focus on curation of items
Less clothes but of a better quality
A macro view on ‘need’, rather than the micro view defined by the now
You had the vintage well tailored tweed jacket or furniture that had been in the house for generations. In years to come what will all the delapidated Billy bookshelves and tchotchke fridge magnets say about us? Maybe this is a good part of the authenticity at the centre of Peter York’s ‘Hipster Handbook‘?
I started to think about these things following a death in the family. My uncle lived in the ancestral home; which is a small farm in the west of Ireland. I had spent a good deal of my childhood there with him and other relatives. Life had got in the way of going back in person and there had been bigger gaps in time to my visits than I thought.
Going back to the farm brought thoughts about consumption into sharp focus for me. My Uncle’s approach to consumption was very different to mine and likely yours as a reader.
He never owned a car or combustion engine-powered farm machinery. He hired in contractors and machinery when it was needed
As a child I had played amongst decaying wrought iron horse drawn equipment, that would have been used before the widespread use of tractors
I can remember when electricity was installed
Had a modern television but didn’t use it. He actively preferred the radio as his media of choice
He had a solid fuel cooker that provided central heating for the house. He also had an electric cooker and microwave oven, but refused to use the microwave
His music collection had been gifted to him by family over the years. They assumed that he liked local artists playing Irish traditional music. I don’t think that he went through the process I had done of exploring new music and tastes
He regularly read a local paper, but owned no books bar a booklet on the value of notes and coins
He had never travelled for leisure, but had been gifted souvenirs from my cousins. These came from Donegal to Dubai
Presents that he had been given decades ago remained in a drawer in case he would need them, from ties to aftershave
The family had tried to force him to have a cellphone and he only relented when he was in hospital during his later years and a neighbour gifted it to him
His idea of interactive gaming was a Benson & Hedges-branded deck of playing cards with four people around a table for a game of ‘Twenty Five‘
His house remained unchanged from when my Grandmother had lived there. There wasn’t his ‘footprint’ in the house at all. From a personal point of view it meant that I could understand my Uncle in terms of ‘what’ he did; but not the ‘inner life’ that we are used to understanding through ‘reading the tea leaves’ of consumption: books, music etc. At the time I came away perplexed, a mystery that I would never understand.
He lived in many respects a pre-industrial agrian approach to life. Time moves at the pace of the farm work rather than the clock. Your mark on the world was in the continued existence of the homestead.
This brought into sharp focus for me the newness and ‘abnormality’ of modern consumerism. Perhaps ownership of the land provided the ‘weight’ that mass consumerism provides for many of the rest of us? And what would it mean if you had felt that ‘weight’ all of your life as my Uncle would have as the oldest son in the family?
In contrast, my Grandmother had been more modern in her attitude to consumerism. She loved the television. She got rid of old wooden chairs that would need the occasional coat of paint for black powder coated steel and vinyl cushion seats.
Into her late 80s she loved DVDs of traditional Irish music performances. A tape of electronica and early rap that I made at the age of 15 so she could understand what I was into at the time was a step too far for her.
The debate over privacy on Facebook got me thinking about the internet we envisaged. Reading media commentary on Tim Cook’s recent address at Duke University prodded me into action.
What do I mean by we? I mean the people who:
Wrote about the internet from the mid-1990s onwards
Developed services during web 1.0 and web 2.0 times
I’ve played my own small part in it.
At the time there was a confluence of innovation. Telecoms deregulation and the move to digital had reduced the cost of data and voice calls. Cable and satellite television was starting to change how we viewed the world. CNN led the way in bringing the news into homes. For many at the time interactive TV seemed like the future of media.
Max Headroom
Starship Troopers
The Running Man
Second generation cellular democratised mobile phone ownership. The internet was becoming a useful consumer service. My first email address was a number@site.corning.com format email address back in 1994. I used it for work, apart from an unintended spam email sent to colleagues to offload some vouchers I’d been given.
My college email later that year was on a similar format of address; on a different domain. I ended up using my pager more than my email to stay in touch with other students. Although all students had access to the internet at college, the take-up was still very low. At college I signed up for a Yahoo! web email. I had realised that an address post-University would be useful. Yahoo! was were I saw my first online ads. They reminded me of garish versions of classified ads in newspapers.
After I left college I used to go to Liverpool at least once a week to go to an internet cafe just off James Street and check my email account, with a piece of cake and a cup of coffee. I introduced my friend Andy to the internet (mostly email), since we used to meet up there and then go browsing records, clothes, hi-fi, studio equipment, event flyers and books at the likes of HMV, the Bluecoat Chambers, Quiggins, The Palace and Probe Records.
I found out that I had my first agency job down in London when I was called on my cell phone whilst driving around to Andy’s house to catch up after a week at work.
The internet was as much as an idea as anything else and the future of us netizens came alive for me in the pages of Wired and Byte. Both were American magazines. Byte was a magazine that delved deeper into technology than Ars Technica or Anandtech. Wired probed the outer limits of technology, culture and design. At the time each issue was a work of art. They pushed typography and graphic design to the limits. Neon and metallic inks, discordant fonts and an early attempt at offline to online integration. It seemed to be the perfect accompanyment to the cyberpunk science fiction I had been reading. The future was bright: literally.
Hacking didn’t have consumers as victims but was the province of large (usually bad) mega corps.
I moved down to London just in time to be involved in the telecoms boom that mirrored the dot com boom. I helped telecoms companies market their data networks and VoIP services. I helped technology companies sell to the telecoms companies. The agency I worked for had a dedicated 1Mb line. This was much faster than anything I’d used before. It provided amazing access to information and content. Video was ropey. Silicon.com and Real Media featured glitchy postage stamp sized clips. My company hosted the first live broadcast of Victoria’s Secret fashion show online. It was crap in reality, but a great proof of concept for the future.
I managed to get access to recordings of DJ sets by my Chicago heroes. Most of whom I’d only read about over the years in the likes of Mixmag.
All of this pointed to a bright future, sure there were some dangers along the way. But I never worried too much about the privacy threat (at least from technology companies). If there was any ‘enemy’ it was ‘the man’.
In the cold war and its immediate aftermath governments had gone after:
Organised labour (the UK miners strike)
Cultural movements (Rave culture in the UK)
Socio-political groups (environmentalists and the nuclear disarmament movement)
I had grown up close to the infamous Capenhurst microwave phone tap tower. Whilst it was secret, there were private discussions about its purpose. Phil Zimmerman’s PGP cryptography offered privacy, if you had the technical skills. In 1998, the European Parliament posted a report on ECHELON. A global government owned telecoms surveillance network. ECHELON was a forerunner of the kind of surveillance Edwards Snowden disclosed a decade and a half later.
One may legitimately feel scandalised that this espionage, which has gone on over several years, has not given rise to official protests. For the European Union, essential interests are at stake. On the one hand, it seems to have been established that there have been violations of the fundamental rights of its citizens, on the other, economic espionage may have had disastrous consequences, on employment for example. – Nicole Fontaine, president of the european parliament (2000)
I advised clients on the ‘social’ web since before social media had a ‘name’. And I worked at the company formerly known as Yahoo!. This was during a brief period when it tried to innovate in social and data. At no time did I think that the companies powering the web would:
Rebuild the walled gardens of the early ‘net (AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy)
Build oligopolies, since the web at that time promised a near perfect market due to it increasing access to market information. Disintermediation would have enabled suppliers and consumers to have a direct relationship, instead Amazon has become the equivalent of the Sears Roebuck catalogue
Become a serious privacy issue. Though we did realise by 2001 thanks to X10 wireless cameras that ads could be very annoying. I was naive enough to think of technology and technologists as being a disruptive source of cultural change. The reason for this was the likes of Phil Zimmerman on crypto. Craig Newmark over at Craigslist, the community of The Well and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The likes of Peter Thiel is a comparatively recent phenomenon in Silicon Valley
We had the first inkling about privacy when online ad companies (NebuAd and Phorm) partnered with internet service providers. They used ‘deep packet inspection’ data to analyse a users behaviour, and then serve ‘relevant ads.
Tim Cook fits into the ‘we’ quite neatly. He is a late ‘baby boomer’ who came into adulthood right at the beginning of the PC revolution. He had a front row seat as PCs, nascent data networks and globalisation changed the modern world. He worked at IBM and Compaq during this time.
Cook moved to Apple at an interesting time. Jobs had returned with the NeXT acquisition. The modern macOS was near ready and there was a clear roadmap for developers. The iMac was going into production and would be launched in August.
Many emphasise the move to USB connectors, or the design which brought the Mac Classic format up to date. The key feature was a built in modem and simple way to get online once you turned the machine on. Apple bundled ethernet and a modem in the machine. It also came with everything you needed preloaded to up an account with an ISP. No uploading software, no errant modem drivers, no DLL conflicts. It just worked. Apple took care selecting ISPs that it partnered with, which also helped.
By this time China was well on its way to taking its place in global supply chains. China would later join the World Trade Organisation in 2001.
The start of Tim Cook’s career at Apple coincided with with the internet the way we knew it. And the company benefited from the more counter culture aspects of the technology industry:
Open source software (KDE Conqueror, BSD, Mach)
Open standards (UNIX, SyncML)
Open internet standards (IMAP, WebCAL, WebDav)
By the time that Facebook was founded. Open source and globalisation where facts of life in the technology sector. They do open source because that’s the rules of business now. It is noticeable that Facebook’s businesses don’t help grow the commons like Flickr did.
Businesses like Flickr, delicious and others built in a simple process to export your data. Facebook and similar businesses have a lot less progressive attitudes to user control over data.
Cook is also old enough to value privacy, having grown up in a less connected and less progressive age. It was only in 2014 that Cook became the first publicly gay CEO of a Fortune 100 company. It is understandable why Cook would be reticent about his sexuality.
He is only a generation younger than the participants in the riots at the Stonewall Inn.
By comparison, for Zuckerberg and his peers:
The 1960s and counterculture were a distant memory
The cold war has been won and just a memory of what it was like for Eastern Europeans to live under a surveillance state
Wall Street and Microsoft were their heroes. Being rich was more important than the intrinsic quality of the product
Ayn Rand was more of a guiding star than Ram Dass
They didn’t think about what kind of dark underbelly that platforms could have and older generations of technologists generally thought too well of others to envisage the effects. You have to had a pretty dim view of fellow human beings. More on privacy here.
1 in 4 Deeply Concerned About Online Privacy – GlobalWebIndex Blog – ok its Global Web Index so you have to take the data with a pinch of salt. Global Web Index is based on people completing online surveys. That means that the technique Global Web Index uses needs to be considered alongside the data. It isn’t observed behaviour, but reported behaviour. One might do one thing and say another. The extremely high rate of concern in Latin America in the Global Web Index survey could be a sampling error on the survey or it could be quite profound given that it would be a growth market for social media networks like Facebook
Privacy fears over police spy tools that can break into mobile phones | News | The Times – The technology was first introduced by the Metropolitan Police for the London Olympics in 2012 and has been quietly rolled out. Privacy International’s report says police are operating without any clear legal framework and often break into phones belonging to people who have not been convicted of any crime, including witnesses and victims
It is a little disingenuous to call the Bose Wave Music System a throwback gadget, mainly because Bose still makes it. It would be reasonable to call it a design classic. There are benefits to picking up a 2006 model Bose Wave Music System, rather than paying the premium of a new device.
Bose Wave System timeline
The original Bose Wave System was launched back in 1984; this was back when Sony was king due to the Walkman, digital wasn’t really on the horizon with the Discman only launching same year. The Acoustic Wave 1 (AW1) was a new take on the boom box radio that was ubiquitous in households and workplaces at that time. The AW1 featured a cassette deck and a two band radio.
Eight years later digital finally arrived when Bose switched out the cassette for a top-loading CD player instead.
In 1993, the Bose Wave System shrank from about the size of a medium sized boom box to something about as tall as an iPod Classic but featured radio only and was called the Wave Radio.
Five years later a slot loading CD player was integrated. In 2004, the CD player also accepted MP3 based discs and Boselink connectivity.
Boselink
Boselink is unique in consumer electronics in terms of the expandability it allows. It was originally designed as a communications protocol for multi-room sound systems, but is also useful for connecting modules that extend the functionality of the basic Bose Wave System. Compatible accessories include:
Multi-CD drive
Soundlink – playback of music which is streamed to the device over Bluetooth
DAB module – UK-only adapter allowing reception of digital radio as well as AM and FM signals
Bose also offered an iPod kit, which charges your iPod Classic and plays back the music. There is a replacement remote for the Bose Wave Music System which integrates basic iPod playback controls.
Vintage over new
The key benefit of a vintage Bose Wave System over a new device is the display. New devices have a back lit LCD display which wash out and aren’t as legible as the vintage vacuum fluorescent displays.
Secondly, you still enjoy the ‘big box’ sound created by the diminutive size of the Bose Wave Music System. They use use a folded waveguide, which is a series of passages from the speaker driver to the speaker grill. This attempts to replicate sound from larger systems. Bose claims the waveguide “produces full, clear stereo sound from a small enclosure by guiding air through two 26” folded wave guides.” The design of the wave guides has changed minimally over the years.
My casual listening at home is based on two systems. A 12 year old Apple iPod Hi-Fi A1121, which works as a centre speaker for my TV when I need it. It takes audio in via TOSLink and gives a better sound than most sound bars that I’ve listened to.
I use a Bose Wave Music System of a similar age to the iPod Hi-Fi with the DAB module connected via BoseLink and iPod adaptor as my go to radio around the house. It is the default provider of background music and up to the minute news. It provides a better sound than most of its newer BlueTooth enabled competitors. It wins out over the Apple iPod Hi-Fi, because of its ability to play digital radio and hide out of the way on book shelf.
I then use a dedicated hi-fi for serious music listening of CDs and vinyl records.
