gmtPLUS09 | live from Seoul

I bought the latest Wired last week, because of the George Lucas/Vader cover and the Seoul Machine article. I haven’t been able to look through the contents, I hope to do so this weekend. Here is a excerpt that interests me on a personal and professional level:

Lee wanted a "design philosophy" to give his products a common
identity, so he hired a Japanese consultant who told him that Samsung’s
products should be infused with Korean values. But Korea had been
systematically purged of its identity during the Japanese occupation
that lasted from 1905 to 1945. So the company began a search for places
and objects that embody the
Korean spirit and found Seokguram, a remote mountain grotto that houses
an
exquisite eighth-century Buddha. Through the search they developed the
slogan "Balance of
Reason and Feeling" to express Samsung’s design philosophy. "It’s very
Oriental - not black and white, but a balance of things," explains
Hyun-joo Song, the executive in charge of design identity. "It states
that we will meet the emotional needs of our customers with the
technological solutions we have."

About this time last year, one of my self-started projects was finalized and
published in-house, called J-Factor or Japanese Factor. This term was
originally termed by the Toyota Motor Company for its new design
philosophy. This strategy came into existence to differentiate products
and brands within Toyota’s portfolio (Toyota, Scion and Lexus), and
distinguish its products/brands from the emerging Asian competitors -
Korean (Hyundai) and Chinese (SAIC).

Anyway, I proposed that we create K-Factor (Korean Factor) to build more equity throughout the brand portfolio (Hyundai, Kia, and the proposed luxury brand that is due out in 2007).  Also, the 3 sub-brands with their own distinctive design DNA would decrease the likelihood of cannibalization, and extend the reach of the portfolio. Another positive to come out of this would be shaping the consumer experience of buying a Hyundai product, driving and using it, etc.

Here is where it gets interesting about J Factor. Most Americans can already pick out a  Japanese (brand) vehicle from a Korean, German, or American. From casual observation, their intuitive repulsion or gut feelings kick in to help them recognize and differentiate.

The new design philosophy targets the next generation of prospective customers who are powered by the Internet, and more demanding in how a product fits in with their identity, as well as fashion/lifestyle trends than the previous generations before it.

Main points to remember:

• Reaching peak numbers in the 1970’s, Japanese consumer electronics, cars, anime, Sony, and Sushi were exported to the US or Europe. These products embody what it is to be Japanese, and the American generation(s) who were exposed to and developed a deep impact by these imports were the Generation X and Y. When these cohorts reach maturity and have disposable income…
• A global trend emerges comprising of Japanese-origin fashion styles, lifestyle trends, popular culture, design, culinary, etc.
• And the inadvertent coincidence of Toyota, Nissan, and Honda accentuating their designs with Japanese spirit, called Wa (和).

Basically, these brainwashed kids who grew up with Japanese things early on are instinctively purchasing more Japanese things because of the deep and wide exposure to Japanese things.

Link: PSFK: How Samsung Made Korea A Consumer Electronics Superpower.

A reader of This Blog Sits at the offered this comment:
"Install a good SETI system."
How about a SETI@Home system? Distributed coolhunting/trendspotting via the blogosphere?

As McCracken notes this is an excellent example of the lucrative intellectual capital opportunities that the internet makes possible. This is a clever idea and I can only imagine the scale of such an endeavor.

McCracken lists 2 conditions that are currently in place for a SETI@home system and one that has yet to arrive:

• Any willing participants are qualified as observers. This isn’t just for the professional gurus that had once occupied this task.
• The blogosphere provides instantaneous access to all participants so that observation and value-adding intelligence can swarm in a "decision markets" kind of way.*

*As stated in a review of The Wisdom of Crowds, SETI@home provides all of these: (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of
members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method
for aggregating opinions. The diversity brings in different
information; independence keeps people from being swayed by a single
opinion leader; people’s errors balance each other out; and including
all opinions guarantees that the results are "smarter" than if a single
expert had been in charge.

• A third condition has yet to arrive, which is an incentives-based system. No one is going to create value unless they have some way to harvest value. I have seen trend scouters such as Look-Look and Trendwatching that pays (small amounts of cash) /rewards (gifts) participants. It would be interesting to be rewarded with more ‘value’.

What McCracken provides is more or less a conventional business model. We monetize the outcome (trend reports, trend conferences, etc.) and
then pay the participants.

Everyone contributes to the lowest rung of SETI@home. This is on the
order of “something I just noticed.” This is the equivalent of the
“pictures” of space that SETI has us work on. Then everyone takes a
small problem, often their own contribution, and thinks about them
carefully and well. Then we need a line of editors who sort, bundle and
promote various things. This creates a much smaller, but still quite
large universe. So we need another set of editors working at this still
higher level. I guess that’s maybe how it would work. We get access to
the next aggregated level of SETI@home if one of our contributions have
“made the cut.” (Presumably, we want to aggregate this too, so that we
get to keep our access privileges even if our latest contribution has
not make the latest cut.)

Our incentive here is that we get access to streams of intelligence
and analysis. We give to take. But it would also be possible to give
people in industry access to one of the levels through a subscription
fee, and this could then be distributed to editors and participants. Or
it might be used to fund an annual conference for the SETI@home
players. This would be a fully participatory TED or POPTECH operation
and it should probably be held in conjunction with same. (I prefer the
latter and that’s because Andrew Zolli is the man.)

I know someone is going to say that this entire affair is just too
damn Canadian, that’s it tries to organize what is ought to be and is
in fact emergent. I beg to differ (though of course the criticism of
Canada is precisely right). As it stands, we are reading one another
and citing one another. But I don’t hear anyone sitting down, taking
the feeds from x blogs and given them a systematic, clarifying,
aggregating treatment which in turn becomes a feed to some still larger
act of aggregation and analysis.

As a last note: for the list people we would want to contribute, may
I suggest John Maeda, Allen Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT
Media Laboratory, author of “Design by Numbers,” “Meada@media,”
and”Creative code” and Scott Fedje, Director, Image Design at Cole
Haan. I heard them both talk at the FUSE conference and they were
sensationally good. Fedje did some great stuff on remarkable
developments taking place in Japanese retail design, including a store
the internal space of which changes shape constantly.

Link: This Blog Sits at the: SETI@home.

Dr Patrick Dixon is contacted by TV, radio and press journalists around
200 times a year (up to 70 times in a single day) for comment on major
issues and trends. Here is a short film made as a result of one of
those calls.
            

SWR, the German
equivalent of the BBC, sent a film crew to London to follow Dr Patrick
Dixon over four days in December 2003. Dr Dixon has been ranked as one
of the 50 most influential global business thinkers alive today (Thinkers50). SWR came to find out what day to day life is like.

The
short film sequence joins Dixon at a government-sponsored think-tank on
global trends with 25 other analysts, at home in his own TV studio from
which he lectures to audiences in up to nine nations at the same time.
We then travel with Dixon to Dubai where he speaks about "The Spirit of
Success" at a major client event for Fedex / Times of India, and then
travels on, commenting on wider geo-political issues.

Link: Watch TV documentary about Dr Patrick Dixon, Futurist.

A generalist approach for spotting trends by Grant McCracken (author, Culture and Consumption).

Rule 1:

Take any possibility seriously. The new wouldn’t be new unless it
defied expectation. All ideas, even crazy ones, must be taken
seriously.

Rule 2:

Install a good SETI system. This is about pattern recognition. Rule
1 means that we are going to have lots and lots of “trend candidates.”
We need some culling system that allows us to get rid of false
positives. In the case of the real SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence), there are 5 steps: 1) collect data, 2) find candidate
signals, 3) check data integrity, 4) remove radio interference, 5)
identify final candidates.

Clearly, these two rules are related. The credulity of Step 1
exposes us the chaos of too many trend candidates, and obliges us to
embrace a Step 2 that sorts out the real trends from the apparent ones.
Indeed, the wider we cast the credulity net, the more formidable must
be our powers of pattern recognition. Or, the formula I prefer: the
better prepared we are intellectually to spot a trend, the more widely
we may cast the net.

In fact, we could say that these two rules force an interesting and
necessary intersection in a Venn diagram: where the circle 1 of
dreamers/droolers/utterlyingenuous overlaps with the circle 2 of
hardheaded/toughminded/cleareyed. This is a very good place to be, not
least because in a culture in which anything is possible no longer
finds much of interest in someone who sees that everything is possible.
(“The world supplies that, we don’t need you.”) The real question is
whether any given possibility contains any trace of plausibility,
whether it might visit us, that is to say, not just in the imagination
but in the world. But, I am missing the obvious (comme toujours): the
intersection of circles 1 and 2 is for certain purposes precisely the
characteristic intersection of culture and commerce (not to mention the
place this blog sits). 

An example given McCracken:

"So, anyhow, I’m reading the New York Times today, and there is a
story about a guy who’s renovating his place and decided that he will
have no chrome, steel, aluminum, nickel or any brushed, satin or
polished metal in his home.

As he put it, “No visible metal has become my new obsession.”

Rule 1 says that we must consider this as a new trend candidate. No
more metal. No more homes that shine, gleam or even glow. Good bye to
all those bright, shiny bits in the kitchen and bathroom. Good bye to
anything sleek or polished. Good bye to anything light bearing.

At first, this seems ludicrous. What are the chances that North
American householders would ever forsake “visible metal?” But if we are
reacting simply against sheer implausibility, this must give us pause.
Sheer implausibility is, in fact, the best chance that this trend
candidate deserves a hearing. The really new new must always offend us
in this way. If someone had tried to tell us that middle class
householders would someday install industrial strength stoves in their
suburban kitchens, we would have laughed at them.

Rule 2 says that we must root through the intellectual toolkit to
see if we have anything that would provide “skids,” a way to “dock” the
candidate trend with what we know and a future we can imagine. There
are lots of approaches here, but one particularly jumped out at me:
brightwork. Brightwork is the name for the bits of metal on North
Americans cars. It was especially current in the 1950s.

The term is sufficiently arcane that my Microsoft spell checker does
not recognize it, and now shows it with that accusing red underline
that says, summon your best imitation of a highly judgmental Bill
Gates, “you have made a mistake” or, as it will be understood for the
remainder of this blog entry, “this is a trend candidate for which we
cannot vouch. Proceed at your own risk. Low Headroom.”

One of the points of brightwork was to make cars look fast. It
helped to create the impression that the car was “streaming” forward.
It was brightwork, among other things, that helped give the impression
that cars were “moving even when standing still,” a phrase of high
praise for cars at mid century.

I cannot prove, but I do nevertheless believe, that there was a deep
cultural connection here: the appearance of motion that brightwork
supplied and a temporal orientation that prized the idea that
individuals, corporations and countries were “moving forward,” “racing
into the future,” and otherwise, “on their way up.” The confusion of
movement in space and time was, I think, a key article of mid century
modernism. (This is, I know, a ludicrously grand claim and I have
substantiated it to some extent in Culture and Consumption II, in an
essay on the 1954 Buick.)

Anyhow, the “brightwork” idea gives us a way to think about the
trend candidate presented by the NYT author. If he is removed
brightwork from his home, we might suppose that other individuals will
do so if and when they decide that the home should be stripped of these
important traces of dynamism, that they wish to retreat from a culture
that prizes individual and collective mobility, that one of the new
objectives of interior design is aesthetic stillness. Naturally, I
can’t even begin to imagine whether any of these things are true. But I
know have a set of auxiliary trend candidates, the encouragement of
anyone of which would help reinforce the “candidacy” of the “no metal
trend.”

This is not a great example, perhaps. The brightwork notion will
test your credulity even more than the “no metal” one. But it does
suggest how “rule 2” might apply here. And this gives weight to the
notion that trend watching should be left not to the hippest person in
the room but the person who actually knows something about the culture
in question.

We all know who I am talking about. The cool hunters who take good
corporate dollars in return for a recitation of all the things you end
up taking for granted if you live in TriBeCa. These poor creatures
don’t have intellectual depths. They only have tabloid-like surfaces.
They can only reflect what is. They cannot reflect upon it. One of
these days I am going to name names. I really am. It is time to remove
this “radio interference” that we might examine the future with new
clarity."

References
Marin, Rick.  2005.  Heave-Ho, Silver!  The New York Times.  April 7, 2005. 

Link: This Blog Sits at the: how to spot a trend.

A friend forwarded me a recent  trend tabloid today. If these services were freely available years ago as they are now I wouldn’t have much to gripe about.  Today, we’re
already overloaded with information from far too many credible news
sources as it is. I guess, with "trend forecast" being a touted as a
valuable asset in many industries in recent years was the catalyst for
the ‘trend’ in
creating trend forecasting publications. But in the end these online
publications are too late, too much.  I guess I have a grudge because
they are doing a disservice to the real professionals who forecast and
interpret trends.

Why do I consider Iconoculture, Trendsetters, Trendwatching and other online publications as tabloids?

The democratization of technology has given these firms the means to
cheapen the tools and processes of trend gathering and reporting. And
the products that they offer for free or for sale are highly speculative, diluted (too
broad in scale and without focus) and manufactured without any hard
evidence and involves little or no ethnography or demographic studies.
They have created a monster to justify their profit-driven existence.

Another annoyance are the free newsletters often arrive too often and eventually clog up your inbox/junk folders.

Here’s my point: These tabloids filter and collect all kinds of news
and topics, then throw everything out there and wait for you to grab
whatever pieces to ‘paint’ the picture. If that’s the type of mumbo
jumbo you want, that’s fine.

If all this information is so readily available for any individual (including your competitors), then what competitive advantage do you have in using
these for your planning and strategy?

Also, if every product/furniture/fashion/graphic
designer, business analyst or decision-maker reads their respective
trade magazines, how would it be possible for distinguished and
innovative  products and services to come out. This is exactly what
happened at this year’s Milan Furniture Fair.

If everyone in their industry makes the same predictions year after
year, it can only mean one thing: they are reading the same reports,
talking to the same people, etc. It should be best to call up an acquaintance and enter his "circle of
trust". He and his group could just may offer a fresh perspective on your seemingly unrelated industry.