Images source: flickr

I finally got through Transformations, which has left me with lots of blogging ideas and a lens to look at world around me. The book is highly recommended, Grant McCracken is able to achieve the balance between theory and practice, pulling high and low brow examples of how we are a culture of transformation (in terms of, for example, social standing, identity, and gender roles.) Transformation is organized into four types, which are roughly chronological, traditional, status, modern, and postmodern. The last one describing how we are porous, where transformation flow in and out of ourselves. For this to occur, we have taken over the authorship over our identity, traditions, and rituals.

What comes after Postmodern transformations?

I think the next evolution we are currently witness to is the rise of Networked transformation. The Networked transformation takes the multitude of the Postmodern transformation and moves beyond it, using the speed and comprehensiveness of the internet.

Where as McCraken describes the Postmodern transformation self as porous, the Networked transformed self is fragmented and refracting, like shards of a broken mirror. The porous self denotes a soaking inward. In a networked society, culture is both pushed and pulled toward the individual, seemingly at the speed of the internet. The process is more catch and release. Actually, a more apt description is reflected and projected. The typical New Yorker who adopts the fashion trend of camouflage absorbs little, if any, of militaristic meaning of the object. Rather, it is reflecting outward an adherence to a clothing trend, influenced by designers and people on the street or in the media. Further, what is consumed and assumed and then used to formulate our multiple identities spin outward, via the network.

Roles, identifying to a discovered culture in consumed and projected back out, through ego-casting vehicles of Facebook and Twitter, as well as, more directed and one-to-one types of communication. Our digital selves are becoming our actual selves. The shift has real consequences as we become more digital, and people such as Nicholas Carr start questioning these changes. At some point, we will no longer we able to distinguish between our digital self and actual self. Cues or ideas of new identities will be taken from friends, or celebrities whom are treated and spoken about as if they are intimate friends, enabled in some way by the internet.

The web has removed (the confines of) place and distance from our lives. The speed of the network also has increased our ability to consume and assume new identities. The new limiting factor is not waiting for the next great thing or movement, but rather, it is our attention span and the human capacity to want that change. (What happens when the transformation is forced upon us, is another question.)

Authenticity, which McCracken points out was so crucial in the desire for upward social climbing in Modern transformation, has been left behind by many. Such authenticity can be learned and shared via the network, rendering the scarcity aspect of authenticity to be meaningless. The decoding which was once difficult to learn is now accessible through a simple internet search. The internet allows for the access to learn and enforce an authentic identity by anyone with an internet connection. Sites dissect and lay out the minutia of any topic. Movie sites, such as the pioneering Ain’t It Cool News site published industry news, rumors, and gossip that was once only privy to Hollywood insiders. It now, of course, has competition running in the hundreds if not thousands, depending upon how you count. Access to authentic insights allows for the virtual vicarious living. (Although, the network transformation does have a real effect, as seen by the movie fans shaping the re-shooting and release of the film Snakes On A Plane. The line between insider and outsider is blurring, and artifact of the networked transformation.)

However, for many people, the effort of using the network to achieve an authentic transformation is too much work, especially when the identity consumed/assumed is so disposable. Who has time to fact check these days? The Networked transformation allows two unknowns to manipulate New York socialite scene by running Socialite Rank, a status ranking blog. Now, identities can be created and accepted as credibile, only to cast off with the same whim as it was adorn, before any inaccuracy is discovered. Granted, Socialite Rank was a special case. For most, the assumption of identity because my friends are doing it and I want to keep up my social currency, is enough.

A lot of the tension in the world can be viewed and understand through McCracken’s ideas of transformation. These changes occur at difference rate across family, companies, and countries.  Change can be threatening, especially when those changes affect truths who hold to be fundamental to our construction of the way things work.

What’s in my browser…

List of movies based on Shakespeare, my favorites are the teen ones.

Before Photoshop, there was hand drawn fashion illustration.

Excellent post on why sneaker shopping has become a painful ordeal.

Kim Deal (Pixies and Breeders) chat from Japan to parents in Ohio.

“Bow down before the one you serve, you’re going to get what you deserve.” - Trent Renzor, Nine Inch Nails

I recently went to a conference on location-based services hosted by Columbia University’s Business School. The conference panels had some very good speakers, but before I get to that, I am more interested in putting down some of thoughts on the architecture of the b-school’s Uris Hall. In Bill Moyer’s now classic series with Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, Campbell speaks on identifying a period of a civilization through its grandest architecture. At one time in civilization, the biggest and boldest architecture were religious, (Notre Dame, Angkor Wat, Borobodur.) Later, government buildings were the most monumental (Pentagon, Reichstag, UK Parliament.) Today, corporations inhabit a society’s feats of soaring architecture (Sears Tower, Tapei 101, World Trade Center.)

The hierarchy of buildings is a direct reflection of the society’s focus and emphasis. A similar phenomenon can be seen on university campuses. These reasons for this hierarchy is fairly obvious, schools that will produce the richest alumni and procure the largest private industry and government funding can afford to erect new buildings. Especially in the recent building craze, we often find that business school have the newest and shiniest facilities. Law and engineering schools also tend to the fair rather well in this regard as well. Humanities tend to be housed in older, albeit more charming, buildings which smell of learning. To be fair, one of the newest buildings on the Columbia campus is for the School of Social Work, and while not business, law, or engineering, it is still an applied discipline. Although, Uris is not the newest building on the campus, the Columbia Business has announced that they will one of the first to be relocated to their new Manhattenville (read: Harlem) campus. The use architecture as a litmus test of the focus of a society is a simple but compelling one.

Image source: Dulce Pinzón

And speaking of transformations, I recently saw the show Superheros: Fashion and Fantasy show at the Met’s Costume Institute. The show, skillfully art directed by a friend Shane Valentino, was well curated and displayed– mixing the source material from the original comics with film costumes and related representation in fashion. I mean, who doesn’t want to see Linda Carter’s outfit from Wonder Woman?

However, the photography of Dulce Pinzón takes the concept of the superhero and flips it on its head. Originally from Mexico, Pinzón takes photos of immigrant workers who come to the US to work and send back remittances each week. In 2006, an estimated US$45 billion dollars from 12.6 million immigrants were sent back to Latin American from the US, revealing the magnitude and symbiotic interdependent relationship.  In this example, Sergio García works as a waiter in New York. He is able to send back US$350 a week. Other heros include Superman as delivery boy, Batman as car service driver, and yes, Wonder Woman as laundromat worker. The subjects of her work are simultaneously honest, absurd, tragic, and inspiring, while questioning our concepts of the idols, hero, fame, and equality.

It’s funny how ideas come together. I’ve been slowly making my through Grant McCracken’s book Transformation. This morning on the train, I came to his section on the post-modern transformation of man, in particular on the absorption of hip hop culture into the wider mainstream (read: non-African American.) The chapter coincided with Absolut’s viral campaign feature a KW pill that turns you into Kanye West, entitled “Be Kanye,” which I first noticed it as a guerilla ad on the subway.

Image source: bekanyenow.com

The tension between the authentic and the simulated is a major theme of his book. Here, the transformation and exchange is at its most literal, take a pill and physically turn into West. Instead of “being like Mike” (or West) the transformation is complete and actual. The amazing part is that obviousness of the gesture, instead of the usual implied subtext that Rob Walker discusses, the promise of transformation IS the text. Their only gesture to veil the promise is through the parody of an informercial, there is not real pill, just drink Absolut. I wonder how much further would a marketing campaign take the suggestion of the literal transformation.

Image source: flickr

Image source: flickr

On the way out to Provincetown from Boston, a few weeks ago, I noticed a sole windmill on the shore, largely ignored by the passengers on the ferry. However, on the other side I saw people rush over with digital cameras to snap at a lighthouse on the other side. I made a mental note to get some pictures on the way back. Sure enough on my return, the lighthouse drew out the cameras, even in misty and slightly choppy waters.

In a time of soaring energy and fuel costs, plans to build modern windmills are decried as wrecking the “natural” landscape of the Jersey Shore as well as Nantucket Sound. T Boone Pickens, the legendary Texas oil business man, is placing bets on wind, investing millions into wind farms in Texas. In an interview in Fast Company magazine, he has an interesting quote:

And you’ll do all this on your beautiful 68,000-acre ranch?

“I’m not going to have the windmills on my ranch. They’re ugly. The hub of each turbine is up 280 feet, and then you have a 120-foot radius on the blade. It’s the size of a 40-story building.”

I appreciate Picken’s overall strategy that this country needs to shift away from dependence on oil and carbon-based fuel and towards sustainable and clean energy sources. But it’s too bad that he has such a distasteful view of the aesthetics windmill.

On the other hand, the lighthouse is an interesting piece of architecture. Once a crucial aid in navigating the waters at night or in storms, they usefulness is challenged by advances in GPS, telecommunications, and mapping. However, they remain camera worthy icons of the sea and coasts. Preservation societies have been formed to assist in their upkeep and some lighthouses have been designated as history buildings. I wonder if the original construction of lighthouses were challenged for corrupting the natural landscape. Or if they were largely ignored at telephone poles are.

I do not think that there is something inherent to the lighthouse that makes it more palatable to the mainstream cultural aesthetics, because the traditional wooden windmill have the same elevated sense of historic and aesthetic value.The funny thing is that I find windmills really beautiful, especially many of them in row. Without any post-modern irony, these structures conjure allusions from Boeing to Walter de Maria to Don Quixote.

How can the modern wind farm reach the same level of good will that lighthouses and wooden windmills are afforded? Is it just that they icons of another time, having lasted long enough to achieve a romantic cultural status? Are the protests even worth arguing? New proposes are suggesting that windmills can be moved further off-shore and out of sight. This sounds more expensive to operate and build that ones closer or on the shore. I do know that a high percentage of power is lost in transport. Aesthetics have an economic and social cost.

The relationship between the windmill and the lighthouse is emblematic of a larger question that been occupying brain space for over the past year, which has to do with building an ethic of design. Many people and groups including Buckminster Fuller (more on him soon) and designers in the Bauhaus movement have approached this idea, or least defined an intention for design to improve lives. However, we are at at turning point, where the stakes seem much higher and the need for ethical design seems more relevant.

Can a framework exist for an ethical approach to design that would balance aesthetics, sustainability, equality, and empowerment? If it doesn’t yet exist, what kind of structures would it entail? What can we provide that goes beyond a suggested philosophy? Can the advancement of technological tools and computational metrics can be utilized to guide the ethical designer?

In a very nice comment, Frank mentions a link to weakening relationships from buzz marketing, and digs into deeper branding versus innovation, which is another important part of Lucas Conley’s argument in OBD, which I only briefly mentioned in my original post. Marketing has become more focused on brand positioning and re-packaging then developing new and useful changes to the products.

As Conley states, when entire product categories such as laundry detergent or paper towels have been improved to be effectively the same, long standing brands such as Tide and Bounty (which I have used for decades, mostly likely because they are the ones I grew up with) are left with marketing strategies to differential themselves. I will admit that some of the packaging strategies are useful improvements, and while I like the form factor of the glass ketchup bottle, Heinz squeezable plastic one does work better. However, for each of these useful cases, we have dozens of brand extensions. Conley cites the five (and counting) versions of the Swifter, as an example.

This feature creep, where new add-ons clutter shelfs with orange juice with calcium, Kleenex with aloe, and toothpaste with breathe strips. A second related effect is that customers get used to a product, only to find them discontinued with new product lines when they try to replace them. How many more blades that they fit on a razor? I wouldn’t mind if 5 or 6 or 7 are available, if they would still make the older models (with a mere 2 blades) that I liked and are increasingly harder to find.

All these marketing efforts come at the price of true innovation advances in the underlying technology of these products. However, innovation is of course, hard. It is not at all surprising that marketing is chosen over innovation. These kinds of changes are risky and costly, and more new products are failures than successes. For every iPod, there are zunes, Newtons, and new Cokes. These risks make companies more defensive and concerned about protecting market share. But why can’t a paper towel be a paper towel until sometime better comes along?

What are we, as consumers, to do? It’s hard when use your purchasing power when companies discontinue the

When Apple releases a new product, Apple fans exception industry shattering, paradigm shifting innovations on the scale of the iPod. The light-weight mini-laptop Air got some harsh reactions. But the funny thing is that people don’t remember that the iPod didn’t instantly create the American mp3 market or change the way we conceptual our entire music collection as mobile. Rather, it took time for people out exactly what the iPod was.

Similarly, while Apple is predicted to sell 10-13 millions iPhones this year, Nokia sold 115.2 million of the 294.3 million phones sold globally in the *first* quarter of 2008.

Image source: bn.com

I’ve recently finished, OBD Obessive Branding Disorder - The Business of Illusion and The Illusion of Business, by Lucas Conley, who write for Fast Company. I’m way behind on blogging, so I’ll keep the book review short, and will reference the book in some other posts that have been brewing in my brain.

Conley discusses branding and marketing along similar lines as Rob Walker’s Buying In. However, he takes a much more explicitly critical view of the current practices of today’s marketers, where as Walker writes from a more description perspective. One of Conley’s most interesting passages is on “buzz agents” that are paid to push products to friends and acquaintances. His concern is that when any stranger or worse any trusted friend or family is a potential marketer, the value of our entire social network are at risk. This risk is exacerbated by coupled with findings from the American Sociological Review from 2006 cited by Conley. The General Social Survey (GSS) which measure people feelings and social perceptions, found three times the number of people who stated that they didn’t have anyone to discuss important matters, than 20 years ago. The study also reported only half of the participants claimed to have two or fewer close friends and a quarter claiming having no confidants at all. Therefore, not only are we getting more isolated, the trust of the people we do interact with is decreasing as well.

Telecommunications encourages people to seek out relationships over space, and makes it easier to avoid those in their immediate surrounding. Further, as mobility increase and people move across states and countries to attend school or to find work, traditional face to face social networks are weakened. Just as Walker states that we use brands to create our own identities, Conley states that we form communities based on brands.

One side distraction of the books is its, at times, loose use of statistics to bolster arguments. In one early section, describing how US companies are replacing innovating with marketing. This is a troubling observation, reveals in the way company reshape, repackage, reposition, and retire their products rather actually innovate. Conley cites that the number of hours worked in the US is decreasing while they are increasing in the countries, many of which are in Asia. This idea would only be relevant if more hours worked translated to more innovation, which is may or may not be true. While I agree that sacrificing research and development for more marketing and brand positioning is bad for long term business practice, confusing links to data is distracting.

Overall, OBD is a good read. He notes the ironic end point, that anti-branding voices such as Ad Buster and Naomi Klein, author No Logo, are established brands themselves. I appreciate that Conley attempts to tackle the idea of how to rethinking the brand which surrounds us. Although he doesn’t provide an actual roadmap to encourage social and corportate change, which may not even exist.  If brand are inescapable, then what are people who agree with Conley to do?

Images source: flickr.com

The objects and tools around us are losing their physicality. Our cars, watches, music, phones, adding computers, and now light sources are less analogue and mechanical, as they become more digital and quantum / nano scale. Although these new innovations perform better, faster, and more efficiently, we lose the ability to see and understand how these technology work. Everything operates in a conceptual black box, as we pray that things work when we need them, because we cannot fix them by ourselves even if we were so inclined. Although we can learn conceptually how an digital watch works, we have lost the ability to use physical cues of how things work. This loss may not be earth shattering, but it does eliminate the ability of us to fix things when they break down as well as adapt their inter-workings to conform to our own needs. We are encouraged to throw away and conform.

Light from oil-based lamps and candles once provided the standard way of seeing at night. Even if you didn’t understand the physics of combustion, you could still built a mental model of how it works through experience working with its physical cues. Fire burned fuel to make heat and light. If a lamp wasn’t working, the problem could only be a few possibilities, most likely having to do with fuel and oxygen.

The introduction of the incandescent bulb worked by sending an electric current though a filament in a bulb. Here, the electric charge flowing through the filament also created heat and light. Electricity was a much safer and convenient energy source for lighting the home, an important advance. However, it was a step away from the physicality of our source for light. Even without precise knowledge of the basic science behind the light bulb, if a light bulb wasn’t working, you could still try to figure out the problem, by checking to see if it was the bulb or the power. We know that when bulbs burn out, the filament breaks. Therefore, we shake the bulb to hear if the filament is broken, albeit gently in case it is not broken. The sound of the broken filament is still an excellent feedback mechanism for testing a bulb. The kind of natural feedback that Don Norma discusses in “The Design of Future Things.”

This simple, yet effective method of testing a working bulb is eliminated when we move to the compact fluorescent bulbs and Light Emitting Diodes. On a physics level, light from CFBs and LEDs work on a nano or quantum scale from the macro or classical physics scale. Similarly, the CFBs and LEDs also take us another step away from the physicality of light. Although we still have bulbs or diodes, respectively, the objects themselves give us less natural feedback to what is going on. How do you tell what is happening when a CFB or LED is dead? I have no idea. CFBs and LEDs are cheaper, more energy efficient and last much longer than incandescent bulbs, which makes the gains in trade off preferred to the status quo.

In the end, I’m left wondering what is the value of this physicality? How important is it for people to have physical models of how their objects work? Am I just being nostalgic for the past or is there something greater at stake?