Changeism: FC Edition by Scott Smith
April 8, 2008
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Among the markets that are taking financial hits due to the current US economic wobble/slowdown/meltdown (choose one to suit your personal level of anxiety), apparently the cosmetic surgery industry is facing a nip and tuck of its own. Along with cutbacks in spending on such critical areas as interior design and sports cars, America's newly monied are opting for a reduction in reductions while the bad times last.
While official figures aren't kept on a month-to-month basis, anecdotal evidence among practitioners and customers alike collected recently by journalists suggests that the desire to achieve the perfect manufactured body through easy access to retail plastic surgery has suffered a noticable decline in recent months. This downturn reverses some of the white-hot growth rates the sector had been experiencing, just as many doctors had made the investment to add cosmetic treatments to their menu of services. According to reports, many potential patients are opting for botox and other temporary non-invasive treatments over under-the-knife procedures like liposuction, breast augmentation and facelifts.
The implications for this shift are manifold. American, and global, aesthetics for beauty have been changing for some time, and have recently taken a steep turn toward artificial over natural, with media coverage of cosmetic surgery acting as an echo chamber, encouraging less wealthy, younger consumers to slice their way to this new definition of beauty. For the digital set, we even suspect there has been a sort of aesthetic merger with the look, feel and ease of creating virtual selves--making themselves into personalized avatars online and off. Harder times may mean this crowd sticks more to shaping second lives than reshaping real ones. Secondarily, a turn to other, less expensive means of reshaping and resurfacing may be on the cards as well. The market for cheaper chemical peels, microdermabrasion, cosmeceuticals, and injectable treatments will certainly benefit. Also, unregulated, black- and grey-market products will probably benefit as well, many trafficked in from Asia.
Lastly, as Slate points out, doctors may have to seek other forms of business, perhaps returning attention and investment to some of the basic services that lost attention as these new revenue streams in casual cosmetic servicesemerged. The loss of qualified doctors and other medical professionals to less critical but more profitable areas of treatment has undoubtedly had an impact on availability of services (it's doubtful that many new casual cosmetic treatment services subsidized core medical practices in any significant way). This bad news for dealers of sports cars and interior designers may be good news not only for drug stores but for sick patients as well.
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April 1, 2008
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A recent article in the Los Angeles Times lifted the lid on something the wired individual is beginning to experience more and more: being caught in a Realtime Knowledge Discontinuity (let's call it RND for short). RND sufferers have the distinct social disadvantage of having real-time access to information that their companions, interlocutors, and colleagues do not, by sheer dint of owning a convenient information appliance like an iPhone. It's a voluntary digital divide which engenders a social divide as well.
Whether it's exact directions to a location, an answer to a trivia question debated by friends, or a phone number someone else is searching for, the RND victim is able to grab the sought-after nugget of information with a few quick touches of an interface, popping his or her head into the global information sphere just long enough to be the know-it-all on the spot, trumping everyone else with not just the information but the physical (ok, digital) proof in hand as well. "Jenny wasn't at the party, you say? Oh, I beg to differ--let's check Flickr and I'll show you," or "No, Cafe Savant moved three months ago, to the place across from the mall!" The innovations of mobile broadband, pocket Internet access and the Web let you find out anything, just about anywhere you have access. Growth of the semantic and geographic layers of the Web have increased the power of access by orders of magnitude.
Why is the person with the technology at the disadvantage? In part because of the social
stratification that information access increases. Not everyone wants to have the Internet at their finger tips all of the time, as the LA Times article points out:
Daniel Bernstein had one when he arranged to meet friends at a bowling alley
in Daly City, near San Francisco. The lanes were booked. Bernstein used
his iPhone to locate another bowling alley 10 miles away, find out how
long the wait for a lane was and get driving directions.
Bernstein, director of business development at an Internet company,
said his friends seemed more irked than appreciative. "They said,
'Thank you, iPhone,' " and not very nicely.
Having real-time access to information reveals several contrasts between those who do and those who don't: economic (I can afford it, you can't), social (knowledge is power) and technological (I can navigate things you can't). While it seems humorous now, this is an issue that bears tracking in the future: mastery of information has always been a social differentiator, but the speed of access, and the volume of information available, will exacerbate the differences.
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February 19, 2008
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Experientia's Putting People First today points to an article in the Boston Globe about the growing interest among technology developers in creating products that appeal to women. The article points to big players such as Nokia and Microsoft as those making a research investment in creating products and services that address not only the stylistic interests of women but also their social preferences and cognitive
patterns.
The big push by these companies and others is to get beyond what one female salesperson I spoke with in an electronics store derisively called the "shrink it and pink it" mentality of developing technology for women (while restocking a section of small, pink MP3 players). One interesting breakthrough is that Nokia, Microsoft et al are beginning understand that technology designed by (predominantly) male engineers and developers contain architectures and processes that reflect the mindset of the designer (see Michele Bowman's piece about mobile phone selection here to witness the frustration). As such they don't necessarily reflect the values, behaviors or tastes of what is increasingly the majority of the tech purchasing public in the US.
Nokia's Tera Ojanperä puts a finger on the issue exactly, saying it isn't about "shrink and pink," but about humanizing the products and services that are offered, making them more social. In general it can probably be said that the sharper focus on the social aspects of technology, greater application of people-centered design strategies, and the improvements that are being made in some areas in usability are all helping to draw women to the cash register and makes them happier, more productive, more satisfied customers, which in turn encourages more of the same approach.
The long-term implication for consumer technologies is broader application of visual, cooperative/social, relational values and characteristics in new products and services. It may also mean a longer-term shift in the information processing patterns of male users as younger consumer adapt to these rebalanced cognitive maps and processes; hierarchies, collections, "buckets," may fade as information navigation metaphors over time.
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February 15, 2008
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Many industries are riding a green wave at the moment--not nearly enough, but more and more vertical markets are looking into sustainability to attract more customers while lessening their impact on the environment. Consumer electronics is one market that has gotten a lot of attention in the past six months. As the number of computers, mobiles and other devices shipped worldwide continues to rise, major players in tech are looking for ways to be more green (the recent Greener Gadgets event in New York City being one emerging venue to focus attention on the issue--some notable entries in the design competition are here). Doing so, however, means significant changes in everything from the materials devices are made of to how they consume power.
Nokia has taken steps to raise its profile in this area, and has recently shown an number of demos of mobile devices made from upcycled materials. It released the 3110 Evolve at CES, which is made in part from recycled materials, and is now showing off the Remade, a non-working concept made from recycled aluminum, rubber and various other parts, as well as using electronics that would have a smaller environmental impact in production. The Remade looks attractive, and appears to show that sleek, stylish and sustainable can be blended successfully. Granted, it still requires energy and materials to produce these devices, and they will probably end up in a landfill at some point anyway, but it might at least compel buyers to switch to a more sustainable consumption channel than they currently use.
More interesting to us, however, is the emergence of a potential upcycling industry at street level in other parts of the world than where repair and reuse cultures now exist as cottage industries at the moment. Nokia and others are trying to learn from the street to make it possible to extend the life of a device. Others are looking at allowing consumers to customize their own handsets down to the component level, potentially encouraging longer lifecycles as well. While creating ways to produce a more earth-friendly device is an important step, moving from profiting from a planned obsolescence/frequent upgrade economic model to one where hardware lifecycles can be extended in going to be even more critical. As resources become more costly both for producers and consumers, usability will not only mean ease of use, but economics of ownership as well.
For now, making sustainable behavior easier for consumers by making it attractive, convenient and easy is moving things in a positive direction.
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February 15, 2008
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About three years ago, having returned from living in the UK for almost four years, I began thinking about the contrasts between different national cultures' acceptance of new technologies. In my lifetime in the US, and probably in the lifetimes of several generations before me, "new" has been perceived as a good thing. A steady flow of new technologies have been viewed as one of the engines of the economy. Capital systems, manufacturing, advertising, and many other sectors of the economy have been driven by it. My experiences in the UK, Scandinavia, Asia and elsewhere have shown me that different countries and cultures seem to have quite different attitudes toward innovation--seeing this has been one of the benefits of looking at technology uptake on a global basis for the past decade or more.
Being an analytical person, my thoughts at the time focused on whether one could create an index to measure receptivity to innovation on a national basis. Finally, someone has attempted to do this: a group called the Institute for Innovation & Information Productivity (IIIP) recently released the initial findings of a study of 12 countries in which it probed receptivity to new technologies, perception of benefits and intent to purchase new products.
The results, which the IIIP say it has not fully analyzed, are interesting. According to the IIIP Innovation Confidence Index, rapidly developing economies such as the United Arab Emirates, India, Brazil and China rank as more receptive economies to innovation than European nations such as Finland and the Netherlands, with the US sitting somewhere in the middle. One driving factor in higher confidence seems to be the growth rate of the national economy and probably the related openness of younger, more globally aware populations to progress and innovation, paraphrasing the study's authors. By contrast, countries where several generations have become accustomed to innovation and have perhaps slowed their pace of uptake, or simply have a more educated filter for measuring progress vs. payoff, ranked lower.
Measuring innovation confidence is a delicate and difficult operations. The IIIP has approached it thus far by asking a few simple questions. Hopefully they or another group will take this line of inquiry deeper to get to the cultural triggers that determine receptivity. One trigger has to be experience with innovation and confidence that investing financially and emotionally in the "new" is worth the time and effort. British consumers have discovered this not to be the case by and large over the past few decades, and therefore they have little confidence when invited to embrace it again. Japan and Korea have entrenched cultures of quality and trust which support their consumers' decisions. It will be interesting to see if, after 10 or 20 years of experience, Chinese or Indian consumers maintain their levels of confidence in innovations.
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