Ged Carroll

Category: culture | 文明 | 미디어와 예술 | 人文

Culture was the central point of my reason to start this blog. I thought that there was so much to explore in Asian culture to try and understand the future.

Initially my interest was focused very much on Japan and Hong Kong. It’s ironic that before the Japanese government’s ‘Cool Japan’ initiative there was much more content out there about what was happening in Japan. Great and really missed publications like the Japan Trends blog and Ping magazine.

Hong Kong’s film industry had past its peak in the mid 1990s, but was still doing interesting stuff and the city was a great place to synthesise both eastern and western ideas to make them its own. Hong Kong because its so densely populated has served as a laboratory of sorts for the mobile industry.

Way before there was Uber Eats or Food Panda, Hong Kongers would send their order over WhatsApp before going over to pay for and pick up their food. Even my local McDonalds used to have a WhatsApp number that they gave out to regular customers. All of this worked because Hong Kong was a higher trust society than the UK or China. In many respects in terms of trust, its more like Japan.

Korea quickly became a country of interest as I caught the ‘Korean wave’ or hallyu on its way up. I also have discussed Chinese culture and how it has synthesised other cultures.

More recently, aspect of Chinese culture that I have covered has taken a darker turn due to a number of factors.

  • Ron Arad’s tablet design concept for LG

    Ron Arad is more famous for his architecture and art than product design. I went along to see him speak at an event that is part of London Design Festival last week thanks to the China-Britain Cultural Exchange Association. Arad’s presentation felt largely unplanned as the curator of the talk asked him to jump around from project to project rather than a clear narrative being presented. Arad showed imagery or video that he then talked around.

    During the presentation he showed off the design concept that he did for LG that pre-dated the iPad. It sounded at the event like Ron Arad had started his thinking in 1997, but the sources I looked at online stated that this project was done in 2002 and the video copy I found on YouTube states that the copyright is 2003.


    The video is quite prescient in a number of ways

    • The device was primarily about content consumption and messaging
    • He nailed the in-home use case, with the exception of realising that the iPad may be a communal shared device rather than belonging to an individual
    • It has a flat design interface (though this might be a limitation of their ability to create it on video and a spin on the circular LG logo)
    • The soft keyboard on screen
    • There is no stylus
      There was auto-rotation of the screen
    • It has no user serviceable parts (this was at the time when cellphones and laptops came with detachable batteries)
    • Inductive charging with a table rather than the small pad used by the like of the Microsoft/Nokia Lumia devices
    • The way the controls where superimposed on footage of the user working with the device is reminiscent of the way TV and films are now treating parts of a plot that involves messaging

    There were a few things that it got wrong:

    • Arad clearly didn’t understand the significance of the iPod, so the device had an optical drive rather than side loaded video content
    • The device is really big, more like a laptop screen than a phablet, a la the iPad Mini or Galaxy Tab
    • The form factor was too thick, understandably so when they are trying to squeeze a battery and optical drive in the device, the thickness had a benefit in that the device was self-standing. Apple relied on covers and cases to provide the standing mechanism

    More gadget-related posts here.

    More information

    The Israeli designer who (almost) invented the iPad | Times of Israel
    The Simple Way “Sherlock” Solved Hollywood’s Problem With Text Messaging | Fast Company

  • Weiden Kennedy Tokyo + more

    Weiden Kennedy Tokyo did this great brand video for Nike Korea, they supported it with a ‘Be Heard’ campaign on KakaoTalk. Weiden Kennedy Tokyo work for Nike is consistently of a really high standard. More marketing inspiration here.

    One of the things that had been keeping me busy over the summer was working with Racepoint Asia on the planning and strategy behind this video to promote the Huawei P8. On reflection it could be cut down to 3:15 with a branded end screen to make it tighter, but its a great bit of video shot by Jenn Russell.

    Ashley Vance talks about his talks with Elon Musk of PayPal mafia, Tesla and SpaceX fame

    Adidas China put together a few videos of local artists in China to promote the Superstar ‘shelltoe’ trainer. They feature musician Eason Chan (Canto-pop veteran with some EDMish remixes), VJ Mian, pixel sculptor Li Tian Lun, and street muralist Hua Tu Nan. This is hosted on YouKu so you will need to be patient to get it to load

    There is something meta about the concept of TED Talks at the Burning Man festival; its like a cliche of daikaiju proportions, but if this gets people interested in mathematics, so much the better.

  • The changing culture of Silicon Valley

    I have have been thinking about how platform changes are marking a changing culture in Silicon Valley. This changing culture will play not only into innovation but workplace practices.

    1990s

    When I was in college I interviewed for a few placements, one was with Hewlett-Packard in Germany. They wanted a marketing student to look after their printing brochures on demand initiative for their UNIX product line. This was going to save them a mint in terms of marketing spend using an Indigo Digital Press rather than brochure runs on litho printing, reducing waste, storage needs and allow for faster document updates. (HP went on to buy Indigo in 2001).

    Commercial adoption of the web was around the corner, I was already using it in college, but its ubiquity still seemed quite far away. I decided I didn’t want to go for the job primarily because I wanted to get my degree over and done with. Also HP weren’t paying that much for the role.

    We were interviewed by a succession of people, the only one who was memorable  was a guy called Tim Nolte who wore a Grateful Dead ‘dancing bears’ tie and had a Jerry Garcia mouse mat in his cubicle.

    At that time HP, had the dressing of the company man but had more than a few hippies on the payroll who permeated its culture. Reading Robert X Cringely’s Accidental Empires made me realise that technology was as much a culture war as technological upheaval.

    Counterculture

    If one looks at the icons of the technology sector up to and including the early noughties many of the people were influenced by the counterculture movement if not part of it. The  Grateful Dead where one of the first bands to have their own website at dead.net. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded by John Perry Barlow, a lyricist with The Grateful Dead. Steve Jobs was influenced by Indian mystics and his experiences using LSD.

    Stewart Brand who founded WIRED magazine and The WeLL was the editor of The Whole Earth Catalog, a guide to useful things for people who wanted to get back to the land. He was influential in the early environmentalist movement and had been involved in the counterculture of 1960s San Francisco.
    Members of the Golden Circle Senior Citizens Club of Fairmont holding quilt they made. The quilt was raffled off during the Fairmont centennial, May 1973
    Ideas from open APIs and creative commons came from their libertarian values. Open Source Software again comes from academic and countercultural attitudes to information and has had to defend itself from accusations of communism, yet it now runs most of the world’s web services and gadgets from smartphones to Google’s search engine.

    Reading the Cluetrain Manifesto is like reading a screed that could have come from an alternative Haight Ashbury.

    Aeon magazine wrote an article on how yuppies have hacked the hacker ethos, but the truth is they’ve got behind the steering wheel as web2.0 declined. The move from open web API’s and the walled garden approach of Facebook and their ilk marked a changing of the guard of sorts.

    Flickr had and ability to move your photos as a matter of pride in their product. Just a few clicks kept them honest and kept them innovating. Joshua Schachter’s similar approach on del.icio.us allowed me to move to pinboard.in when Yahoo! announced that it would be sunset.

    Government always is the last to catch up, which is the reason why open data only really gained mainstream political currency in the past five years.

    Yuppies

    Were now in a changing culture that sees a Silicon Valley whose values are closer to the Reagan years and I am not too sure that it will be a positive development.

    I suspect that the change won’t be positive for a number of reasons. Greed will be good. There will be no lines that won’t be crossed in the name of shareholder value. Innovation will be viewed as a cost. Silicon Valley’s imperfect meritocracy will be undermined by a boy’s club mentality.

    More information
    Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date by Robert X Cringely
    Don’t listen to Bill Gates. The open-source movement isn’t communism. | Slate
    How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos – Aeon

  • Google Hangouts + more news

    Google Hangouts

    Google Hangouts breaks out on its own site | TechRadar – dismantling Google+ piece-by-piece literally with the Google Hangouts service. Google+ has been a failure for user adoption; even if they did benefit from the enrichment of search data. Whether Google Hangouts will remain, who knows?

    Consumer behaviour

    China is two-speed consumer market | warc.com – high speed and low speed consumers – These high speed households, consisting mostly of the urban middle-class, currently number 81m people and generate $1.7tr of the $3.2tr in total urban consumption, but their numbers will swell to 142m by 2020 when they will account for $3.8tr of the $5.6bn in total urban consumption. – high speed consumption is crucial to China moving to balance its dependence on exports. More China related posts here.

    Tinder and Hookup-Culture Promotion | Vanity Fair – is this really that different from the traditional meat market approach?

    Culture

    HAVE BRITS ABANDONED RAVE CULTURE? | DJMag – Newsbeat was probably the wrong format to do the report from

    How to

    How Long to Read – find how long it will take to read any book

    Luxury

    Ritz-Carlton, Naples shares a slice of pie on social media | Luxury Daily – being useful, smart social play

    Luxury Hotels Move Into Low-Touch Luxury | L2 Think Tank – thinking carefully about process and the use of digital

    Media

    Channel Mum looks ahead after ITV takes a stake | digiday – ITV investing in YouTube content

    Online

    Is Bing Trolling Google & Alphabet With ABC.WTF Redirect? – looks like some prankster punk’d Alphabet

    Retailing

    China’s Ecommerce Giant JD.Com Expands to Russia | SocialBrandWatch – just because Russia is under western sanctions doesn’t mean that the Chinese won’t go there. Chinese tourists are already driving much of the demand for luxury goods at GUM and other high end shopping destinations in Moscow. I would imagine Logistics across Russia would likely prove to be challenging. More on retailing here.

    Wireless

    Smartphone giants have lost 15,000 jobs to cheap Android phones this year | Quartz – commoditisation belting the life out of the market. Premium smartphones won’t go away but low market handsets and mid-market will likely converge

    Intel Said to Unseat Q’Com in iPhone | EE Times – Qualcomm has the best modem technology in the market and the iPhone 6S is a premium phone. I can’t see Apple settling for second best technology – will Intel have the IP and the staying power to match Qualcomm? If Intel history is anything to go by; Qualcomm is likely to emerge victorious over time

  • Ice Cube and other things that caught my eye this week

    Ice Cube appearing in a video for Vanity Fair, critiquing interpretations of NWA lyrics on Rap Genius. Its great the way Ice Cube handles it with such good humour.