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:
It is innovative
It makes a product useful
It is aesthetic
It makes a product understandable
It is unobtrusive
It is honest
It is long-lasting
It is thorough down to the last detail
It is environmentally-friendly – it can and must maintain its contribution towards protecting and sustaining the environment.
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.
The playground behind the interviewee before it was refurbished in the early 2000s used to have a roundabout that I was thrown off at a tangent while it spun around when I was about 3 or maybe 4 years old and landed straight into a puddle. I wore a red hooded anorak made of a red sherpa fleece fabric with an elasticated hood, cuffs and bottom which soaked up half the puddle like a sponge. The photographer had his back turned to Grove Road and what is now an Iceland supermarket. Back when I fell off the roundabout it was a Kwik Save.
Struggling
Even back then it had a reputation of being a hard neighbourhood. Local shops such as Griffiths the butchers catered for a customer base struggling to make ends meet.
To the photographer’s left down the road a bit would have been a social club for (former) members of the Civil Defence. The Civil Defence Corps itself had been stood down in 1968. It was a solid working class area full of unskilled and semi-skilled workers who were employed either locally at the Lever factory next door or on the Mersey from the shipyards of Birkenhead to the chemical industry of the Mersey basin and assorted factories further afield.
Community spirit doesn’t pay the bills
By the 1980s, it looked worse for wear. There were few jobs, fewer still that paid well. And that was before unemployment and the heroin epidemic took their toll. As the economy picked up in the 1990s, the benefits didn’t make it to New Ferry. The one bright spot was a pirate radio station ran by community DJs playing house and techno records every night of the week close by to Grove Road playground. I’d held a couple of small (250 people) all night parties (acid house and garage) in the Civil Defence social club, with the blackout curtains keeping the noise and lights away from nosy neighbours and police patrols.
The people who ran the club put on breakfast for the revellers after the main event. We played ambient music from CDs supplied by a friend’s older brother (Tangerine Dream, The Orb, Vangelis, Kitaro, Pink Floyd’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond and Abba’s Arrival) mixing between two Discmans as the tired revellers drank tea and ate bacon ‘bin lid‘ sandwiches while sprawled out on the floor.
Tickets were sold in advance and the venue details given out on the night by ringing an answerphone. Everyone involved broke even if they were lucky.
Despite being really hard scrabble there was a certain amount of community dynamism going on in the village hall. My Mum used to travel down there to go to knitting classes with older women, some of whom were Irish like her. They would knit for charity.
But all that won’t keep social decay from the door while the community is underemployed and underpaid.
No easy answer
The social decay described in the article isn’t something that happened overnight but over decades. There is no quick fix to the social decay of bad behaviour and feral gangs of children. It is not clear whether there is the commitment, investment, government will or the way to resolve this social decay.
The most individually logical thing to do in a time of social decay is thinking more about personal safety.
Techno-utopianism of early 2000s
Looking back the technology adoption of the 1990s and early 2000s was phenomenal. The mainstreaming of the cellphones, the PlayStation, home PC computers and internet access creating immediacy.
The changes wrought by mobile phones in particular are still rippling through the developing world.
Driving in Japan
I am a huge fan of walkabout and driving videos because you can tell so much about the environment looking at retail spaces, brands, clothing and social interactions going on around you. For instance Japan’s apparent rejection of the electric car for now, favouring hybrid vehicles instead. This particular one of a rural Japanese town gives you a good idea of where Studio Ghibli‘s work comes from.
Fintan O’Toole on Ireland
Great talk by Fintan O’Toole at the Edinburgh Book Festival.
Quiller came out of the cold war. The Quiller series were written under the name Adam Hall by Elleston Trevor who had actually been born Trevor Dudley-Smith. Elleston Trevor like most of the other writers had either served in the second world war or in the national service afterwards. Quiller features in 19 novels written from the mid-1960s to the last one in the mid-1990s.
The books go into a lot of technical detail about spy craft. While he is a man of action, he doesn’t live the high life like James Bond, but has to worry about filing expenses and grim and grey atmosphere of London and Warsaw Pact countries. He has a nervous tick when under stress and has to deal with ‘office politics’ of difficult personalities.
Like Bond Quiller appeared on film, The Berlin Memorandum was re-made as the Quiller Memorandum. Quiller was also made into a TV series by the BBC in 1975 for one season. I knew nothing about it until YouTube.
Spy novel industry
There was a veritable industry of British spy writers. Ian Fleming had James Bond which has been continued like some bizarre literary science zombification experiment long after Fleming himself had died. Post-Fleming’s death there has been 32 new James Bond novels written.
Len Deighton had the unnamed protagonist of his first set of books (though they would be given the name Harry Palmer in the film adaptations):The IPCRESS File, Horse Under Water, Funeral in Berlin, An Expensive Place to Die, Spy Story, Yesterday’s Spy and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy. As this wasn’t enough Deighton wrote ten books about the jaded intelligence protagonist Bernard Samson.
Anthony Price wrote 19 novels featuring Dr David Audley and, or Colonel Jack Butler.
All of these characters had more ‘derring do’ than John LeCarre‘s George Smiley. Deighton’s Bernard Samson’s character has the jaded aspect of Smiley. Anthony Price’s stories are best described as as somewhere between George Smiley and Robert Hannay with the past and ‘present’ woven together.
For the love of books
I picked up the bug of reading these books from my Dad. He used to go and buy these books along with Alistair McLean novels from a florid man in the local market. (Alistair McLean novels were basically the same book and same character with different names and locations).
My Dad left school at 13, he can’t spell but at that time he loved reading novels, engineering books and history. They were around the house at home, so usually after my Dad had read them, I started to read them myself. My childhood reading was a weird mix of ‘children’s books’, fantasy novels which were considered suitable for children (J.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula LeGuinn), spy novels, text books and classic science fiction. My Mum made sure that I had a smattering of Irish folklore books in the mix as well.
One person’s literature is another person’s trash
Nowadays, alongside the weighty tomes of James A. Michener, you would be hard pressed to get an Oxfam shop to take many of these books off your hands.
While Le Carre & Fleming have their dedicated followers, the Quiller books, Len Deighton and Anthony Price will be overlooked.
The war on terror didn’t fire the imagination in quite the same way, yet as we go into a new cold war we might see a renaissance in Quiller-type archetypes in escapist fiction of our current times. Mick Herron’s Slough House series ground us too much in reality sometimes.
Abbott curated this interesting discussion on sports health. In my lifetime we’ve gone from football coaches giving players Guinness to bulk them up to this detailed scientific approach which I previously would have only associated with serious bodybuilders like my college friend Carsten who looking for marginal advantages.
Hong Kong
Brain-drained HK workforce marks historic decline – Asia Times – a few things here. The Chinese visa applicants (less than 15,000) coming in won’t plug the gap: 95% of Hong Kong Talent Visa Approvals Are From China – Bloomberg. Though this might not cover mainland Chinese graduating from Hong Kong universities. Secondly, once growth takes off Hong Kong will lose its relative attractiveness for Chinese from an economic point of view. Secondly, the brain drain of teachers, medical staff, social workers and middle class professionals is starting to become significant from the Hong Kong government’s perspective; but a rounding error from Beijing’s viewpoint.
Japan
Repost: Weebs! – by Noah Smith – Noahpinion – While I was in Japan over the last two weeks, I asked some local startup founders, VCs, consultants, and random friends whether they had ever heard the word “weeb”. Not a single one had. I was pretty stunned, because Japanese cultural products have given rise to a whole worldwide subculture, and people in Japan itself are barely aware that that subculture even exists. It’s not like it’s a fringe thing, either — the latest volume of the anime Spy X Family was the bestselling book in North America this week, and soldiers at the front in Ukraine do Pikachu dances to relieve stress. Japan became a cultural superpower almost by accident – this was a new one on me. I thought otaku was still the label. NHK World on famous ‘Weeb’ Steve Jobs.
pearº – The World’s Biggest Social Experiment – Pear Ring – imagine if Match.com as well as extending into events for singles decided to allow people to have a badge that said ‘I’m single, date me’. That’s the premise of Pear, except that the badge is actually a ring that looks like fake jade…
Online bookseller Book Depository is closing down with some three weeks notice. It wasn’t a topic at work and barely made a ripple amongst British friends. The Hong Kong part of my social media bubble shared the news and were sad about it. The company had been owned by Amazon since 2011. I used it for a few reasons:
Free postage anywhere. I have friends around the world and Book Depository was a good way of sending a gift book. It made the process of international gifting so much easier. I bought a set of books there as recently as last week. Many of the upset people on social media were from Australasia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia
Getting hold of English books when I lived in Hong Kong. At the time I lived in Hong Kong there were a couple of nice chains that did English language books, but if I wanted something for my professional life or esoteric interests, then online made more sense. Dymocks, Eslite and the various independent stores would only get you so far. For everything else Book Depository helped out. This was partly down to book shops being a ‘lifestyle’ in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia. They carefully curate fiction but aren’t necessarily like the university book shops I spent my teens and twenties in
Arbitrage. Despite being owned by Amazon, there were a number of items that I bought where there was a price difference between Book Depository and their parent company
You could find a particular edition or format, with Amazon it could be a bit of a lottery
It isn’t full of tat like Amazon. Amazon Marketplace has been both a blessing and a curse. Amazon hasn’t done a good enough job curating Marketplace. I found Marketplace useful at the beginning, rather like a fixed-price eBay. Now its a dystopian retail experience littered with a substantial minority of counterfeit products and sub-standard garbage
Their ask the author section provided some interesting reading.
The brand
I always had it in my mind as ‘The Book Depository’ rather than Book Depository. It’s always the way I discussed it with other people. I had to go back and edit stray ‘The’s that slipped into this post.
Book Depository home page
Diminished ambitions
Book Depository is being closed by Amazon as part of cost cutting across its book and device categories. There is a certain irony in Alexa being in full retreat just at the time when LLMs were about to turn up. Alexa skills are likely to get loss in the subsequent withdrawal and LLM expansion. Book Depository helped plug gaps on the map where Amazon didn’t have native businesses. The decline of Book Depository implies an upper limit to Amazon’s global retail expansion.
Beauty bots drive R&D at Unilever’s £68 million facility | Vogue Business – The world’s highest concentration of robots doing material chemistry can be found at Unilever’s lab in North West England. Vogue Business gets a behind-the-scenes peek at the facility, which develops innovative products for brands including Hourglass and Living Proof.
Is China’s New Rocket Really Coal Powered? Deep Space Updates – April 2nd – YouTube – yes kerosene made from the kind of coal hydrogenation process similar to what SASOL used in apartheid-era South Africa. The National Coal Board had a pilot plant doing something similar during the late 1980s at Point of Ayr under what was called a ‘coal liquefaction plant‘. I used to know a few of the guys that had worked there previously. The plant had a number of experienced oil refinery technicians on the staff when it was running. The site was subsequently taken over and was where BHP Petroleum built their sour gas facility and brought natural gas ashore from the Liverpool Bay oil and gas field in the early 1990s. It also probably tells you everything you need to know about China’s climate related decarbonisation goals.
How the new generation of weight-loss drugs work | The Economist – the potential benefits of such drugs go beyond their ability to promote weight loss in individuals. By showing that molecular mechanisms hinder people’s attempts to lose weight, they show that gluttony is not to blame when people remain obese. That should slowly help to eliminate the stigma. Both weight-loss surgery and drugs are useful tools in the fight against obesity. But by changing the conversation these new drugs may remind health-system leaders that they need to do much more to encourage healthy lifestyles.
Hong Kong
‘Fair price, fine quality’: Hong Kong fast-food chains become go-to place for mainland Chinese budget tours | South China Morning Post – Established eatery chain Café de Coral was among those capitalising on the trend as it offered advance bookings for the tour groups, which have increased after the city fully resumed cross-border travel with the mainland earlier in the year. A Post reporter at 11.45am on Monday observed two mainland tour groups of about 30 people each being guided from their coaches and taken to Grand Waterfront Plaza, a shopping centre in To Kwa Wan, where they dined at the site’s Café de Coral outlet.
Online trolls are taking a toll in China – BBC News – In collectivist cultures such as China, those perceived as going against the norm tend to be severely punished, experts say. What makes it worse, they add, is a pervasive culture of shame. “A strong sense of collectivism in China can mean that cyberbullying, when perpetrated as a symbolic act of violence or aggression towards another in a public setting, may lead to drastic measures, such as suicide, to escape that sense of humiliation,” says K Cohen Tan, a vice-provost at University of Nottingham Ningbo China
Bob Hoffman has been pointing out the problems with the way online advertising has been run for years. Bob’s book Adscam is probably one of the best critical examinations of the online media eco-system and the risks inherent in programmatic advertising.
Bob Hoffman got to speak with the European Parliament. Bear with it as audio improves through the recording.
He also spoke at the Digital Marketing is Broken event.
Interesting talk on the benefits and limitations of economic sanctions with a particular focus on Iran and Russia.
Ireland
I never realised that Sony had a factory in Ireland as early as 1960; Sony globalised production of transistor radios relatively early on in their production life. Compare this to the later US technology businesses setting up shop in Ireland over the next couple of decades. This also might go someway to explain why Sony was such a respected brand in Ireland and shows how visionary and experimental the Sony management were. These comments on Irish workers in 1963 versus their Japanese counterparts are interesting. The assembly workers don’t seem to realise the intrinsic value of (the Sony Japan-made) transistors that go into the products – this might be down to education as this was likely a soldering and screwing products together assembly line.
Suzuki-san points out what he thinks are flaws with Irish workers whilst recognising that this partly down to the different social contract between employee and business. Part of the problem was that Irish workers had the opportunity of going abroad without any government restriction compared to Japan. Suzuki-san didn’t believe that Irish workers are bad workers, but rather they require more investment to encourage them to become good workers.
Interesting perspective on the Windsor Framework from an Irish and EU perspective. Tony Connelly did one of the best podcast series on the Brexit process for RTÉ
Materials
I am a big fan of the Rose Anvil account for the way they take a deep dive into materials and shoe construction. Here’s a great example of their work which shows the design principle of what you leave out is as important as what you leave in a product.
Retailing
Olivia Moore on Temu e-commerce app. Her idea of ‘invisible AI’ is actually more prevalent than Ms Moore thinks, otherwise great conversation to listen in on.
Connie Chan does a short talk on the future of e-commerce.
Armani, the eponymous luxury fashion label of Giorgio Armani posted advertisements in the Financial Times this week. The advertisements harked back to Armani’s looks of the 1980s and 1990s. But what I thought was most notable about the advertisements was their promotion of made-to-measure menswear.
Armani via the FT
Armani is clearly putting its weight behind a return to the office. Presumably Armani think that this move back to the office will also mean a move to formal business dress. This doesn’t seem to be supported by what I have been seeing and is in a stark contrast to the current approach of rival Zegna. Armani have called a lot of past trends right. They were one of the first brands setting up a retail network in China. They were early to putting their catwalk shows on the web to gain a wider audience. Armani were clever in the way they approached licensing of their brand. During the 1990s Armani expanded into sportswear, watches, eyeglasses, cosmetics and home which looked prescient in retrospect.
We’ll see if Armani’s views on a return to the office pan out, I am not so sure it will be.
SVB’s First Failure – The Wire China – SVB’s Board had asked me to found a brand-new bank: the Shanghai Pudong Development Silicon Valley Bank (SPD SVB), a joint venture between SVB and the state-owned Shanghai Pudong Development Bank. The board had committed $100 million to establishing SVB’s operations in China, and I was filled with goodwill and optimism about the endeavor. Although I thoroughly enjoyed my time in China and the many friends I met there, from today’s vantage point, I firmly believe we were (and are still) being played.
For female journalists, covering China comes at a cost — Radio Free Asia – The sheer volume of vitriol targeting reporters given China’s size and the nationalistic fervor of many of its citizens can set the abuse apart. Compounding their anxiety is a fear that the intimidation is sanctioned, if not coordinated, by the Chinese Communist Party itself. “When, for example, an American female journalist gets trolled, it’s probably coming from right-wing crazies or some fringe corner of society,” said Vicky Xu, a journalist in Australia, whose reporting on abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang brought a flood of death threats. “The kind of role and voice they have is very, very limited.
Opinion | Xi’s visit to Putin should worry the West – The Washington Post – If you were looking for another reason why it’s important that Ukraine succeeds against Russia, consider the photos from Moscow. “The President of Eurasia” — I fear that’s the invisible caption of the pictures of Xi that we’re seeing amid the Kremlin’s golden doors and red carpets. The idea that a vast swath of the world is dominated by a China that stands so resolutely against freedom and democracy is chilling. If this alliance succeeds, we will live in a darker world
A Campaign to Remind Us That We Love New York (City) – The New York Times – The people who came up with We ♥ NYC say it is a mark for a different time. But they see parallels to the troubled era that gave rise to I ♥ NY. “We’re hopefully going to be able to cut through divisiveness and negativity” that accompanied the pandemic, said Kathryn Wylde, the president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a consortium of corporations and business executives that is leading the We ♥ NYC campaign. She said that besides rejuvenating people’s spirits, “we want to remind them they can make a difference, whether it’s on the block or in the city as a whole.” She added: “We want to remind them we don’t have to maintain these divisions that have grown up between business and labor and rich and poor.” She cited surveys her group had conducted during the pandemic. “The results we’ve gotten back are people in New York want to be part of fixing what they see as broken in the city,” – Interesting choices in this. Curious to know why they didn’t rally around the previous campaign? It was atemporal in design and a personal commitment, the NY aspect of it implying inclusion? The new one has a lot of challenges: it lacks visual symmetry & balance. Ironically the original works better in digital contexts (for instance as an app logo) than the new version. The emoji heart will date very fast. The font choice I don’t understand. And what about the exclusive nature of NYC rather than the inclusive aspect of NY – even a DE&I fail. ‘Tunnel people’ are a key part of NYC too.
IPSOS noted that global inflation likely peaked in 2022 (according to IMF), and negotiations are happening at the moment between retailers and FMCG companies. Consumers will still grapple with high prices for a good while yet. Ipsos posit that the inflation creates opportunities for growing market share via innovation, with a view to eventual revenue growth.
How Chinese Companies Are Reinventing Management – If a team splits up and some members form a new team, the leader of the new team must pay a fee to the original team for its previous training of the acquired staff. Moreover, the company’s financial system automatically transfers 10% of an acquired staffer’s bonus to the original team leader every month for one year. This system encourages each team to reorganize and generate new autonomous teams
Amazon Faces Moment of Truth on Alexa as ChatGPT Steals Its Thunder — The Information – Toyota doesn’t seem to need Alexa anymore. The automaker has dropped support for an app that allowed users to operate Alexa in their cars via smartphones in 2023 editions of several of its most popular models, including the RAV4, Prius and Corolla. And according to a person close to the automaker, Toyota plans to phase out Alexa integration from the rest of its lineup in the coming years. The automaker is now focused on improving an in-house voice assistant it launched last year and is considering integrating ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI, into it
Style
The influence of cyberpunk on tech wear and functional fashion. William Gibson’s Zero History talks explicitly about the function and tech wear nature of military clothing. They are a central part of the plot line.
Technology
Amazon Faces Moment of Truth on Alexa as ChatGPT Steals Its Thunder — The Information – Toyota doesn’t seem to need Alexa anymore. The automaker has dropped support for an app that allowed users to operate Alexa in their cars via smartphones in 2023 editions of several of its most popular models, including the RAV4, Prius and Corolla. And according to a person close to the automaker, Toyota plans to phase out Alexa integration from the rest of its lineup in the coming years. The automaker is now focused on improving an in-house voice assistant it launched last year and is considering integrating ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI, into it
Taiwan
I am currently reading Chris Miller’s book Chip War. This is a great talk by Chris about many of the areas covered in the book
