Religious Status

I’ve been reflecting on the latest religious imbroglio in Jaipur. I won’t go into the details. The important point is that it’s a free speech controversy between nonreligious novelists and religious activists, with authorities seemingly siding with the latter. The controversy highlights India’s model of secularism, which strives for religious harmony by trying to put the many religions on equal footing while policing inter-religious conflict. This isn’t a separation of church and state, as you’d find in France, Turkey, and the United States. It’s the promotion of equal status of every religion within the public sphere. Often times, however, the model puts the vocal nonreligious in a precarious position.

You see India’s version of secularism on view in the streets. Religious imagery in public spaces celebrates multiple religions, not just one. Of course, different religions have their own artistic traditions. Should the imagery reflect these different styles? What are the risks of not doing so?

A new book by Charles Taylor et al., Secularism and Freedom of Conscience (2011), wrestles with the main challenge posed by this model of secularism.

Under an ethics of dialogue, citizens engage candidly in discussions about the foundations and orientations of their political community, using the explanatory and justificatory language of their choice, while at the same time displaying sensitivity or empathy toward core convictions that are an integral part of their fellow citizens’ moral identity. But how are we to reconcile that ethics of dialogue with the fact that liberal and democratic states also define themselves as “open societies,” that is, societies in which freedom of expression and the vigorous debate of ideas reign? (p. 108)

The authors waffle on that question, concluding that freedom of expression shouldn’t be limited, but that an “ethics of concern” should cause people to self-censor their potentially hurtful views for the sake of community cohesion. What about an “ethics of resilience”? That would entail a duty of citizens to develop a “thicker skin”—be less sensitive, take things less personally, act less threatened by opposing views—on matters of political and religious controversy? Which ethic will become dominant as societies become more diverse? Put another way, which ethic is better at reducing conflict? At promoting freedom of conscience? Or, as a matter of pragmatic coping, will people be required to adopt both ethics to some degree?

Mobile Computing

The revolution in touch-screen computing continues … sometimes much faster than the trade in accessories.

Motorcycle couriers in Seoul have made tablet computers—Samsung Galaxy Tabs, by the looks of it—an integral part of their job. How can a courier keep these displays front and centre while speeding through the city? By turning the tablet into a handle-bar-mounted dashboard, of course. These are crude-looking hacks. That’s not to say they aren’t well thought out. Notice the padding to counter road vibration … the easy-open containers for swift removal … the sun shade to prevent glare … the sturdy weldings to secure the holder … the chopstick holder for, uh, lunch. But notice, too, the obscuring of the motorcycle gauges and the creation of an enormous blind spot. There seems to be a market for a polished, adjustable, and better situated version.

When desktop computers revolutionised the office, professions were transformed relatively slowly. For example, accountants had their jobs changed in the late 1970s, whereas many executive jobs weren’t changed much until two decades later. Tablet computers seem to be spreading more rapidly. Today we see motorcycle couriers relying on tablets. What other commonplace jobs are ripe for a touch-screen make-over? Which ones aren’t very computer-intensive at the moment? What are the lucrative accessory markets just waiting for an enterprising entrepreneur to move in?

Tarmac Motif

Lines painted on roads are there to regulate traffic. Unfortunately for traffic authorities, unlawfully crossing a line seems like a minor transgression to most motorists. That’s why bustling cities are increasingly placing hard barriers on roads to guide traffic. Instead of hard barriers, however, what if cities just changed the symbolism associated with the lines?

As you can see here, some roads in Seoul are subdivided with lines into motor-vehicle lanes, bike lanes, and walkways. This is the repurposing of narrow roads to encourage multimodal usage instead of car dominance. To reinforce the subdivision, the surface of the road has been painted a brick motif with dark outlines (bike lane) and light outlines (walkway). The motif makes it cognitively easier to perceive the different lanes. The illusion of brick lanes also increase the anxiety caused by crossing the lines illegally. For example, not only is a car parked on the walkway easier to spot, making it more likely that the driver is subjected to social sanctions (such as tut-tutting), but the significance of the transgression is amplified by the different surface; it appears as if the driver has gone “off road” physically. Even if everyone knows that the surface is just a paint job, the anxiety-inducing impression persists.

The main drawbacks of this approach: the intricate patterns have to be repainted periodically, wear unevenly, and are less obvious than a raised surface when it snows. The motif can also look tacky, especially amid gentrified surroundings. As a design problem, how can some of these drawbacks be overcome? For example, would a different pattern work better? Different materials? Subtle textures? How can the effect be maintained while also ensuring cost effectiveness?

(Related: Colouring Outside The Lines)

Kitty Shelter

For every consumer product you can name, there’s probably a Hello-Kitty-branded version being sold somewhere. The Japanese commercial character is the standard-bearer of the cuteness economy. That said, I’m pretty sure that the Sanrio corporation, owners of the brand, didn’t license this Hello Kitty homeless shelter. It was clad together by a member of Seoul’s cantankerous, underground-dwelling homeless population, the one depicted in Jin-Mo Jo’s brilliant film Suicide Forecast (2011). In a world where branding is ubiquitous, is it possible for a company to avoid negative associations with its proprietary imagery?

Fashion companies are recoiling from such cases. News agencies broadcast images of a Norwegian serial killer wearing the Lacoste alligator logo, as well as an arrested Mexican drug-kingpin showing off Ralph Lauren’s polo-player logo. Not all publicity is good publicity. A consumer base’s sense of brand affiliation can sour quickly when the brand suddenly connotes the wrong kind of associations. Yet undesirable associations can also open up new markets, as some companies discovered when gangsta rappers made a point of ostentatiously trumpeting luxury brands in songs and music videos. Brand owners can’t always influence the “buzz” surrounding their products … and that can have unanticipated benefits.

That doesn’t mean brand owners won’t try to exert control. I fearlessly predict that, in the coming years, news agencies will be pressured into blurring out logos in imagery of crime suspects and disaster victims. You already see this censorship tactic in some markets when advertising is inadvertently caught in news imagery. Some logos are blurred out in trashy reality-TV shows. Will such practices become widespread? What’s fair game for this form of tangential censorship? Will a disconnect emerge between our ad-saturated surroundings and ad-sanitised published imagery?

(Related: Gun-running Muppet and Cuteness Economy)

Around the Block

Wayfinding in South Korea is dominated by high-tech gadgetry. It’s refreshing to see a clever, hand-crafted alternative that adds charm to an otherwise sterile space. Wood slabs represent each shop in a craft market, as annotated in hangul script. Colour coding differentiates each neighbourhood block. The map takes up an entire wall, making it easy to see from a distance and from many different angles.

As makeshift as the map looks, there are several sophisticated design features in use. As merchants come and go from the market, slabs can be replaced easily. The lack of strict uniformity prevents the switch from looking out of place. The colour pallets of each neighbourhood block cohere, showing an understanding of how colour works. The colours don’t obscure the wood grain, creating a rustic look that highlights the use of natural materials instead of synthetic ones. The overall impression is of a place that is approachable and down-to-earth. And there’s an implicit, subtle reminder that the products in the market are the result of human hands, not robots and assembly lines, and should be valued as such.

What are the other ways in which conspicuous hand-crafting and raw-looking materials can add contrast to our plasticky, enamel-coated world? There’s a fine line between shabbiness and sophistication with such an approach, it seems to me. The design has to age gracefully. It has to demonstrate artistry, care, and taste. What will become more rare and valuable in the future: the natural materials or the ability to apply them skillfully?

Egghead

Packaging an individual food item is controversial when it already has a protective covering, such as a shell or skin. The company Del Monte learned that lesson the hard way when confronted with a political backlash over its plastic-wrapping of individual bananas. Preserving the freshness of the food often has less to do with the decision to package than the needs of the information economy (inventory-management bar-codes, branding logos and slogans, legal disclaimers, expiration dates, and so forth). I’ve talked before about one way around the problem: imprinting directly on the natural covering. These egg hats from a Seoul convenience store are certainly wasteful, but at least have the virtues of being minimal in size and informationally space-efficient. Zero-packaging grocery stores (such as Austin’s in.gredients) may be on the right side of history, but the current global trend is more informational-packaging, not less.

What makes the egg hats particularly interesting is the design inspiration. Would it have occurred to a non-Asian designer to add conical hats to the eggs? In other words, to what extent do actual conical hats used throughout Asia inform the design as a cultural reference (as opposed to a purely functional form)? Are the hats a subtle message to consumers? Does the egghead analogy make the eggs seem cute, and therefore more desirable, in a place where the cuteness economy is popular? Would most customers outside of Asia perceive the analogy? If not, to what extend would that undermine the spread of the design?

(Related: Custom Skin)

Rent-a-mob

Street protesting isn’t permitted in China. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen. Tens of thousands of spontaneous mobs cause authorities headaches every year. These usually involve a local dispute or injustice that escalates as others join in. Many of the mobs get violent. There are also the illegal strikes (which sometimes involve kidnapping bosses) and sit-ins (some quiet and some not so quiet). The widespread impression of China as completely pacified by authoritarian overlords could not be further from the truth, which explains why the state is so touchy about protest movements in general.

And then there’s this roaming mob. It isn’t protesting high prices. It’s protesting high prices. That is to say, it isn’t a political protest against inflation, stagnant wages, and the high cost of living. It’s an advertising ploy to draw attention to a grocery store’s special deals. Motives and affiliations matter. So do political optics: this isn’t an aggressive group of rabble-rousers shouting radical slogans near a government monument; it’s a laid-back group of commercial-jingle chanters who amble casually down the sidewalk in a shopping district. Most bystanders treat the mob as just another onslaught of marketing messages to be filtered out. Quite a few bystanders, I suspect, are a bit unnerved by the spectacle due to the symbolism that street protests have in Chinese political culture. The mob is probably not the grocery store’s best marketing idea.

This case has me thinking about the role of rent-a-mobs in other places. Social media technology has helped coordinate spur-of-the-moment, mischief-making “flash mobs”, as explained by Bill Wasik in the book And Then There’s This (2009). In recent years, information technology has been used successfully to recruit and rally protestors in old-fashioned sit-ins and street protests. How long will it take before advertisers make productive use of these methods? Or is the risk of adverse consequences keeping advertisers away?

Kuribayashi’s Drift

The snow is starting to accumulate where I am. Not much snow. But enough to signal the change in season. And that has me thinking about Takashi Kuribayashi’s installation at the Museum, Beyond Museum in Seoul. The installation is called In Between. What you’re seeing in the photographs is the centre piece, which the German-educated Kuribayashi calls Wald aus Wald [Forest from Forest].

An amorphous snowdrift overwhelms the sharp-edged, geometrically defined space. The branch and crinkled-paper textures contrast nicely with the clean walls. The layers and levels of the exhibit remind us that, in the snowy forest, one creature’s ground is another creature’s roof. The vantage points in between the layers offer some of the most interesting perspectives.

As I write this, I’m watching the snow fall on a bustling city. Cities are full of levels and layers, with another one forming before my eyes. It has me wondering: what are all the in-between perspectives of the cityscape?

Ad Dress

Where do people look when they’re standing in a cramped subway train? Where can they look from their vantage point? Where can they look safely because of people’s instinctual inhibitions and the prevailing social norms? Those are the places you’ll increasingly find advertising, I predict. What kind of advertising? What kind of information? Given that most people in the vicinity have a phone, I suspect that ads will take advantage of that. The game is as much about breaking down the barriers to attention and elaboration as it is about enticing curiosity.

There is a difference between visability and social visibility. We ignore those things that we don’t distinguish conceptually as noteworthy objects (perceptual inattention). We ignore those things that make us feel uncomfortable for whatever reason (selective inattention). In a social encounter, we may glance at a stranger to acknowledge their presence but then avert our gaze to prevent feelings of awkwardness (civil inattention). When people stand in close quarters they tend to be more self-conscious and anxious about where their gaze is pointed. Thus, when in dense urban spaces (subway standing-space, elevators, queues, and so forth), people look for “safe” places to stare: at the walls, at a phone screen, and at the yoke of another’s shirt. And in the “attention economy”, as advertisers call their markets, these spaces are where the money is to be made.

Tiger Abstraction

Rare keepsake. Good-luck charm. Medicinal ingredient. Revered icon. Mythical character. Ceremonial prop. Religious symbol. Cute, eye-catching advertising mascot. We may be using up all of the real tigers. But we haven’t exhausted our imaginations in the ways we portray tigers and imbue those images with meaning.

I’ve been browsing through a compilation of tiger icons (威虎百相, 2010) from a design contest for the 2010 Asian Games held in Guangzhou. The tiger-claw image, shown above, comes from that book. Tigers are portrayed using a wide variety of styles and analogies. As often happens with design contests, however, it’s really the styles and analogies that are being featured, not the subject matter per se.

True wildness has becoming a very rare thing. Few places have gone untouched by human manipulation. How far have our images of the natural world strayed too far from the real and the literal? Are we wallowing in abstraction? As artists and designers, how important is it to return to the real subject to study its character and subtleties?

(Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the claw of an endangered tiger species costs about US$20 on the Chinese black market.)

Side Scroller

Touch screens are spreading rapidly. Designers are struggling to develop intuitive interfaces for this novel method of computer interaction. There’s lots of experimenting going on. And there have been quite a few interface disasters as a result.

This interface strikes me as one of the better experiments. The information kiosk helps people find what they’re looking for on a pedestrianised street in central Seoul. The top half of the screen shows storefronts. The bottom half is a map that shows the location that corresponds to each storefront. By swiping left or right with your finger, you cause the top of the screen to scroll along the street. Thus, you can walk virtually down several blocks of street with a few swipes of your finger. The images of each storefront aren’t detailed enough to do any actual window shopping. And you have to scroll through twice, once for each side of the street. More often than not, the storefront image should provide enough clues about what each store is about. If not, then supplementary information is offered. The big benefit is that there is a close correspondence between what’s shown on-screen and what you see if you actually walk down the street, making it easier to find your way. The big drawback, however, is that you have to remember the on-screen image because you can’t take the screen with you. Our memories are far from perfect.

How does the interface have to change in order to facilitate window shopping? How often must the images of storefronts be updated? How would such window shopping change the storefronts? Could window shopping of that kind come to your phone, in Google Maps street view for example? Is it sufficient to have an infrequently updated images yet frequently updated information overlays that tell of new deals and merchandise? What if the screen could allow you to walk virtually into each store? Or is that ceding too much control to a screen interface while deprecating the more vivid and personalised experience of in-store presence?

Suitable Moments

From Michael Pollen’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2007):

The meso-American practice of cooking corn with lime and serving it with beans, like the Asian practice of fermenting soy and serving it with rice, turn out to render these plant species much more nutritious than they otherwise would be. When not fermented, soy contains an antitrypsin factor that blocks the absorption of protein, rendering the bean indigestible, unless corn is cooked with an alkali like lime its niacin is unavailable, leading to the nutritional deficiency called pellagra. Corn and beans each lack an essential amino acid (lysine and methionine, respectively); take them together and the proper balance is restored. Similarly, a dish that combines fermented soy with rice is nutritionally balanced. As [Paul] Rozin writes, “[C]uisines embody some of a culture’s accumulated wisdom about food.” Often when one culture imports another’s food species without importing the associated cuisine, and its embodied wisdom, they make themselves sick.

I mention the Pollen quotation because it contains an important lesson about the design of food products: mixing and matching ingredients without considering how others have done so before is myopic (and potentially harmful). Culture is a vessel of knowledge. I also want the quotation to set the context for this soy-milk vending machine.

Soy milk has been part of the Chinese diet for millennia. Soy is also a high-volume, low-cost ingredient that’s made its way into diets across the globe. It’s mixed into most processed foods. It’s fed to rich and poor. It’s fed to animals. What is missing as the beverage is removed from its original cuisine? Given that excessive soy consumption can create all sorts of health problems (such as hormonal imbalances caused by the phytoestrogens in unfermented soy), what are the risks of branding the ingredient as a “superfood” and mixing it into everything? In places where soy milk has a long history, have recent changes in diet and eating habits lead to problematic consumption? Are we asking the right questions and doing the right research on the mixing and matching of food ingredients?

I notice that health-food stores are generating new markets by advertising particular foods for the most suitable times and contexts. In this case, however, the same food (two flavours of soy milk) is touted as ideal for various everyday moment. The underlying idea is to get people to think of soy milk as a “comfort food”—a food with a sentimental meaning and emotional appeal—with cute graphics reinforcing that message. How important is it to make the consumption of particular foods more meaningful? Are these meanings valid or just marketing spin? How are these meanings changing the culture? What are the risks of creating new social contexts for food consumption while, at the same time, shedding the context of traditional meals and cuisines (and the knowledge embedded within)?

(Related: Ingredient Branding)

Image Capture

How willing are you to step into a taxi that appropriates your image for use in an advertisement? What if that advertising is designed to create an embarrassing spectacle, such as showing you sitting on a toilet? Does it matter that the toilet-sitting ad is a stylised illustration instead of something more realistic, such as a photo? What if that image appropriation can be construed as an endorsement of a product you’ve never used?

When capturing your image in this way, is consent implicit? That is to say, is it reasonable to assume consent has been given simply by entering the taxi? What about those who don’t notice the ad because, for example, they enter the taxi at a crowded airport? Will we eventually see video cameras capturing the images of passers-by in order to project them onto advertisements? What kind of consent should be required in that case?

Bus Tracker

Posting arrival schedules at a bus stop is very helpful. But printed schedules are burdensome to read (they requires some mental calculations) and can’t be updated easily. So some cities have combined bus-stop signage with electronic schedules, such as Berlin:

This LED screen has its advantages. It can be viewed at a distance and from awkward angles. However, it also has a very low information resolution; that is, the amount and density of the information displayed is lower than what is available with newer screen technologies.

South Korea is the land of screen-tech. Seoul’s bus-stop schedules take advantage of that. The higher information resolution of this screen allows for a more informative interface. More routes and buses can be shown at one time. The intervals between buses, and between buses on the same route, are displayed too. (Notice the points-of-ellipsis on the roads to indicate larger gaps between buses.) That information can help people time a quick visit to a local store or café, for example. The bus and road graphics make it easier to make sense of the information, especially if you don’t know the local language. The graphics could potentially be used to show different types of vehicle and the current capacity of each one. Auxiliary information can also be shown, such as notifications about route changes, stoppages, and emergency alerts.

What new patterns of behaviour can be expected as screens show a larger and larger portion of the local transit system (as opposed to the most immediate and presumed “need-to-know” information)? How does this change service expectations? How can these information kiosks become nodes for transmitting useful city data to phones and other personal gadgets? In other words, how can the screen information and data transmission lead to personal on-the-fly optimisation of the daily commute?

Occupying Space

When you occupy a public space, how do you define your personal territory? How do you mark that territory? For example, what personal objects do you set down in the space and how do you arrange them to indicate the space is being used? As another example, what body postures do you adopt to indicate occupation of the space? What are the acceptable uses of that space? How do you reassure others that your use of the space is, indeed, considered legitimate? What is an acceptable size for your personal territory? How are the boundaries between your territory and the neighbouring territory negotiated? What happens when someone violates, without your consent, the territory you have claimed?

When you occupy that space with your friends, how is the group’s territory defined? How is the group territory divided into personal spaces? And into sub-groups? How are the larger group’s territorial boundaries maintained? Who’s invited in? How is a new occupant accepted into the space and how do the territorial boundaries change to accommodate? When the group sets down objects to define the space, how are they arranged? For example, are some objects placed in the centre to indicate that they’re for everyone’s use? Are some objects not allowed into the space, such as forbidding shoes from entering into a living space for cultural reasons?

What formal rules restrict the group’s occupation of a public space? How long are they allowed to occupy? What objects are allowed into the group’s territory? For example, are fold-up tables and chairs allowed? Are food and beverages allowed? What about tents and sleeping bags? How do the presence of these objects define the usage scenario? What role do the authorities who set the rules play in defining that usage scenario? How can that definition be changed?

In Hong Kong, female migrant-workers from Southeast Asia occupy spaces throughout the South Island: causeways, stairwells, public parks, sidewalks, and so forth. In a city where privately owned space is scarce and expensive, occupying public spaces makes the city more livable. Occupation builds community ties, ties which provide a vital support function while so far from home. Much can be learned from how these people occupy spaces. For example, much can be learned from the ways pious Indonesian women occupy spaces differently than emo Filipino women, as well as the norms that allow mixed-ethnicity and intergenerational groups to share spaces harmoniously. Also, we can learn a thing or two about how to make the most of public spaces which, in most cities, aren’t used enough … and certainly aren’t used effectively to build community.

Moreover, these occupiers can teach us a great deal about our own attitudes towards public space.

Security Theatre

At some banks in Seoul, you can choose how you dispose paper receipts. You can toss them in the trash. Or you can run them through a mini-shredder, a tall receptacle with an input slot just large enough to fit a bank-machine receipt. Presumably, the shredder also makes it easier to recycle receipts because the paper gets separated from other forms of trash at the moment of disposal.

There is something strangely satisfying about running receipts through this shredder. There’s the visceral delight of listening to the machine’s nom-nom-nom. There’s the peace-of-mind of knowing that no one can spy on you by picking through the garbage. Then there’s the childish spectacle of destroying low-tech (paper) waste with over-the-top high-tech means. If the shredder is supposed to encourage recycling behaviour, then it’s a brilliant motivational ploy.

That said, if the shredder is designed to promote security, the usage scenario isn’t very rational. Bank-machine receipts don’t contain sensitive information. Even if you consider bank balances and deposit amounts to be sensitive, the customer is anonymous. Perhaps security isn’t the point, however. The point is the appearance of high security and the ritual of extra security precautions. It’s what Bruce Schneier calls “security theatre”, or high-profile security procedures designed to give the impression of high security without necessarily making you more secure. In his forthcoming book, Liars & Outliers (2012), Schneier argues that a certain amount of security theatre is necessary to maintain public confidence given the many security threats that the public fears but hardly understands. However, as he also stresses, an over-reliance on appearance over substance is a strategy that results in nuisance, vulnerability, and fear-mongering.

Does security theatre like this shredder create paranoia? Is a certain amount of paranoia a good thing? Or does superficial technological gadgetry create a false sense of security that makes us careless when it comes to more serious threats?

Hair Trade

Continuing on the theme of Central African trade with China …

Never mind the appropriation of the image of American singer Beyoncé Knowles. (Commercial image rights don’t extend evenly across the globe, to understate the obvious.)

Instead, think about the travel and trade logistics that makes this cosmetic treatment possible. In all likelihood, a low-wage worker travelled from rural inland China to Guangzhou to attach human hair, gathered from an Indian ghetto, onto the heads of travellers from Central Africa, mostly Nigerian women. The hair stylist would have had to deal with China’s hukou system that restricts internal migration, although it’s also possible the restrictions were ignored. The African would have had to negotiate the more onerous parts of the Chinese visa system. Ignoring those restrictions while in China—by overstaying your welcome, for example—would result in an involuntary trip to Macao, something which has been happening a lot lately. And, of course, there’s no guarantee that the hair actually came from India. Hair from Sri Lanka would come with fewer bureaucratic tangles. It’s even more probable that the hair stylist doesn’t really know the source of the hair.

As C. K. Prahaled argues in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (2005), there is lots of purchasing power and entrepreneurship among the world’s poor. How much international trade between the poor is fragmented and undermined by institutional controls? How important are the work-around artists to keeping that trade flowing?

Swag Safari

For over a decade, China has invested heavily in African natural resources, owing to the Chinese economy’s hunger for raw materials. A large wave of Chinese migration to Africa helps make the trade flow smoothly. The exact number of migrants is a matter of dispute. The figure is estimated to be somewhere between 500,000 and 750,000 people as of five years ago (according to Michel & Beuret’s excellent book China Safari, 2009). As you might expect, the flow of people goes both ways. Guangzhou is believed to have upwards of twenty thousand African residents and a steady flow of visitors. That has changed the commercial landscape in some parts of the city.

This shop is located in one of the neighbourhoods that caters to Central African travellers. The shop sells low-cost, personalised props and souvenirs to be given away to friends, allies, and guests—swag, as it’s called nowadays. Most of the world’s swag is made in China, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that such a shop exists. But how well can the shop cater to the tastes of Central African markets located 10,000 kilometres away? Do the travellers passing through provide enough of a market signal about the wants and preferences in Lagos, Kinshasa, and Porto-Novo? Or does the international standardisation of swag (t-shirts, coffee mugs, pens, et cetera) make big differences in taste a peripheral consideration, limited to colour and size?

Central Africa is a region that is rich in the visual arts. You can tell that just by looking at the elaborate and colourful patterns of the dresses worn by African women in the neigbourhood. How much of that visual richness is diluted by soulless generic swag? How personalised can the swag be if the artwork and templates have no connection with the person’s culture, such as the fuzzy heart motif shown above? What needs to happen in order for real African motifs to be applied? And how could products more useful to the context be used?

A bigger consideration: artistic styles don’t seem to travel across borders as readily as mass-market products do. Why not? How could that be changed?

Annoyance-Free Zones

Crowding creates a problem: it’s difficult to get away from the petty annoyances caused by gadgetry, such as headphone buzz, video-game bleeps, and phone-call chatter. One approach is to designate certain spaces as noise free zones, such as on this Hong Kong Metro line. Unfortunately, the “Quiet Car” doesn’t really live up to its name.

I’ve been thinking about this case while reading Palca & Lichtman’s book Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us (2011). Much of what annoys us is individual-specific; that is, it depends on our personal likes, dislikes, and accumulated experiences. However, there are a few universal annoyances. One of those is the “halfalogue”. It’s one thing to tune-out a dialogue or monologue, but quite another to tune-out one side of a conversation we overhear as someone nearby chats on a phone. Our brains habitually try to fill in the blanks by completing the sentences. The predictable rhythms of conversation can’t be discerned and we get irked by the unpredictability, including the inability to predict when the irritant is going to end. The increase in mental processing (“cognitive load”) makes it difficult to focus on other things. And so we persevere with mild scorn.

Can we train ourselves to be less sensitive? I’ve also been reading the old Roman Stoics, notably Seneca and Epictetus. Their modus operandi is to not get bothered by things. That includes everything from petty irritants to large emotional upheavals. Seneca talks about the time he was lodged in a noisy bath house and remained unbothered. Many of us can do that, however, because it’s relatively easy to tune out random noise in the background. How would Seneca have faired in our world full of less predictable irksome sounds? The Stoics wouldn’t have withdrawn from society as a matter of principle. But their modern Asian relatives, the Buddhist monks, do cope by withdrawing into monasteries and other quiet places. How is emotional tranquility achieved in dense urban environments full of noise pollution? How is it achieved by those of us who haven’t devoted our lives to fending off emotional disquiet?

Palca & Lichtman give a partial answer to that question in their discussion of ambulance and police sirens, noises designed to be annoying. They note that New Yorkers are particularly adept at tuning sirens out, which creates a challenge for siren designers. Will city dwellers simply develop the mental filters to tune out their surroundings? What do we lose when that happens? Will we fight technology with more technology, such as noise-cancelling headphones and more effective sound barriers? Who gets left out by that approach? Will norms of mutual consideration evolve to discourage the most annoying sounds? What social sanctions are necessary for that to be successful? Will we enact public policies aimed at setting limits and dividing up the city into more and less noisy zones? What design and enforcement practices are required to successfully implement that? Or is the answer “all of the above”?

Basket Hack

In Guangzhou, in between the masses of tall buildings, you can find labyrinthine alleyways that are like little villages. That’s where I came across this hack. All sorts of mass-market products are discarded from the tall buildings, such as busted office furniture. All sorts of hand-made craft products are brought into the alleyways, such as wicker baskets. Put the two together and you get some very interesting hybrids. A tall basket with wheels that can quickly change direction: what a great idea!

I have to move my office next week. I’m also giving a speech on office design a few weeks later. So I’m thinking a lot about the inertia and conservatism of modern officing. The evidence suggests that you get happier and more productive employees when you give them more control over the design of their office. Moreover, you get all sorts of improvements when the office designs are better tailored to the actual work tasks being performed (instead of relying on identikit, one-size-fits-all designs). Something as simple as putting wheels on a piece of stationary office furniture can add quite a bit of flexibility.

What other kinds of hacks would you want in your place of work? What appliance or piece of furniture would benefit from rolling … or folding … or hanging … or swinging … or stacking … or clipping together? How could designers make those adaptations easier so that change doesn’t require hacking?

(Related: Designed, Adapted and Metro Hacks)

Digital Tout

Here’s a street peddler plying his trade in Old Canton. As you can see, the fellow isn’t the usual sort of tout. He isn’t flogging wares that are splayed across a table or clustered on the ground. He isn’t pushing brochures at passers-by. He isn’t opening a trench-coat to reveal illicit merchandise. No, the man is wired up with a portable speaker and showing people the goods on a video screen (mounted on an collapsable tripod). The video screen expands the range of goods and services that can be sold on the sidewalk. As importantly, the set-up creates new possibilities for evading the authorities. The gear can be quickly tucked into the bag. Memory cards can be flung into the gutter or deleted on the fly. Everything is portable. No trace is left behind.

In a city where cheap (locally made) electronics are everywhere, should we be surprised that video screens are starting to appear in the lowest of low-brow markets? In a high-tech police state, shouldn’t we expect portable screens to become prevalent in urban grey- and black markets?

This example reminds me of the Warren Ellis graphic novel Transmetropolitan (1997-2003). The novel takes place in a dystopian megacity of the future. Even the most lumpen of the lumpen-proles make extensive use of (what we would consider) high-tech gadgetry, including ubiquitous video screens. Is that so far fetched? Will we eventually see beggars using recycled electronic displays to grab attention, for example? Or will they show digital imagery of their living conditions … or their family members … or their back-story? How could that open minds and wallets?

Call Number

Yesterday, at the PopTech! Conference, Jan Chipchase mentioned the Korean practice of posting a phone number in the window of a parked car. If there is a problem with the car or the parking, then the owner can be contacted immediately. The implication has to do with norms: if most people are expected to post their numbers, are the ones who don’t being “anti-social”?

Notice that the phone number is attached with suction cups to make it easy to put up and take down. This too is common. Is the ability to opt-out, depending on circumstance or whim, what makes this social signalling viable?

Illustration Lesson

Guangzhou’s new central business district, the Pearl River New City, features a shopping zone called The Mall of the World. Like much of the district, the mall is a work in progress; it isn’t open for business yet. Many of the giant video screens light up the surroundings … with Microsoft Windows error messages. But one such screen—six stories, bulb shaped—is in working order and broadcasting lessons in finger painting (using sand sprinkled over a back-lit surface).

This isn’t so much an experiment as it is a place-holder. The painting lessons are inter-spliced with advertisements. I’m assuming that the screen will broadcast only ads once the mall opens. Regardless, it’s worth treating this as an experiment for a couple of reasons.

First, the lessons strike me as a worthwhile public service. Teaching the public about art is an important goal in its own right. It also has economic development implications. As the Chinese economy evolves—moves up “the value chain”—it will become more reliant on commercial design and artistry, as well as the thinking abilities that come with both. Large-scale and accessible public lessons, such as this one, are one way to tweak people’s interest and demonstrate some technique.

Second, even if the screen is reserved solely for commercial purposes, the lessons seem to be an effective way to draw attention. In the evening (second photo), when there are lots of people milling about, the lessons draw a lot of attention. People stop to watch. That doesn’t happen when the ads begin to play, despite the spectacle of flashing, moving, and colourful images. At best, people glance at the ads but it doesn’t draw sustained attention. A clever advertiser would make the advertising messages more integral to the finger painting.

Does advertising work best when it gives the watcher some tangible side-benefit, such as a how-to lesson? Are such lessons the way to capture attention for a sustained period when all of the techniques of spectacle stop working? What other lessons could be offered? What media formats and contexts would work best? For example, would such lessons work better in places where people spend long periods waiting, such as on the small screens of a commuter train? And is this a way for advertisers to offer a serious public service while also selling something (a true “win-win” scenario)?

Buy, Rent, Share

It’s a rainy day here in Hong Kong. That’s okay because the neon and halogen look better when the city has a wet sheen. Plus, even when it isn’t raining, you get wet anyway because Hong Kong’s buildings tend to drip on you.

So an umbrella is a necessity. But it’s a burden to carry around when not in use. On sunny days, an umbrella becomes another piece of clutter in our stuff-cluttered lives. Unnecessary clutter is particularly problematic in the dense metropolises of the Pearl River Delta, where living space is costly. So what’s the alternative? Cheap, disposable umbrellas, such as the one featured in this Hong Kong vending machine? That’s handy but wasteful. What about renting? A kiosk in Guangzhou’s Metro offers rentals for sturdy, full-sized umbrellas. Seems like a great idea to me.

Lately, I notice quite a few business models that try to strike the right balance between our convenience culture and the sharing economy. As Lisa Gansky puts it in The Mesh (2010):

The new share-based businesses are bolstered and built on social media. Using Web-enabled mobile networks, they can define and deliver highly targeted, very personal goods and services at the right time and location. … Something else has changed, too. The credit and spending binge that crashed the economy has left us with a different kind of hangover. We’re increasingly conscious of how we’ve raced through our personal and environmental assets. We’re forced to rethink what we care about. Throughout the world, we are reconsidering how we relate to the things in our lives and what we want from our businesses and communities. We need a way to get the goods and services we actually want and need, but at less cost, both personal and environmental (p. 3-4)

Car-sharing schemes are the most widespread example I can think of. What else fits with this model? And what are the psychological barriers to using these services? The annoyance of late penalties? Worry about the uncertainties of long-term costs? What kinds of satisfaction and “peace of mind” do ownership provide that renting and sharing do not? What else? And how can those barriers be overcome?

Visual Euphemism

A euphemism is a vague, suggestive term that’s used instead of a precise, explicit one. Euphemisms make it hard for others to fully grasp what is said. The vagueness makes it difficult to conjure up a mental image. For example, the term “collateral damage” is often used by military officials instead of “innocent people who were killed” to make a controversial act seem more abstract (less emotional). But we also use euphemism to send coded messages. It may be socially unacceptable to say something plainly, so we use a vague term to insinuate. Ideally, the intended audience gets the message loud and clear, while others remain aloof (a tactic political scientists call dog whistling). If confronted, the message is vague enough that the sender can deny any particular interpretation. In other words, a slippery character evades accountability for saying something controversial.

Cosmetic surgery is a growth industry in Asia, as you’d expect given the new-found wealth of the region. Clinics are popping up all over the place. The idea of redesigning our bodies through surgery is controversial. It’s even more so when a particular redesign presses on a society’s hot-button issues. How do you advertise such a practice? By using euphemism, of course.

I find this advertisement interesting because it’s not just a euphemism, but it’s a visual euphemism. Emoticon illustrations are used in a before/after display to send the message while being just vague enough. The emoticons at the top are advertising eyelid modification, probably the popular “double eyelid” practice that involves adding a crease. When wide manga-style eyes become a society’s ideal, should we be surprised by the popularity of this type of surgery? What do we expect of the political backlash?

How do euphemisms “normalise” a controversial practice? How do visual euphemisms do it, given that they don’t try to suppress mental imagery as much as skew or replace the images? Do they give the practice a different emotional connotation? Do they make the motive easier to relate to? Is it a matter of getting people used to the idea through repeated exposure? What else? As our societies become more and more visually oriented, how will visual euphemisms spread and evolve?