The fate of the ‘moral economy’ lies squarely in the hand of software engineers – all the more reason to appreciate intangible value.
This month, the emerging Pirates party in Germany was able to garner 8.2% share of the votes in elections in the rural German state of Schleswig-Holstein. It was the latest manifestation of the broader civic protest sentiment sweeping through the West. Like Spain’s Los Indignados and Occupy Wall Street, the Pirates are a largely leaderless movement that has a shared purpose but no clearly articulated agenda. It is absorbing general dissatisfaction amongst citizens, but also, for the first time, asserting ‘transparency’ as a democratically legitimatized political platform. Four years after the Obama election, Hope has become a bottom-up vector. The Generation Meaning is assuming places of power but still has to figure out what exactly it is looking for.
frog is delighted to be a partner of the India Design Forum, which will take place in New Delhi on March 9-10, 2012, with the goal of bringing the international discourse on design to India.
The IDF will comprise of a Design Trail (March 2-10, 2012) featuring public exhibitions, workshops, and perfomances in the heart of New Delhi, as well as a two-day conference (March 9-10, 2012). The speaker line-up includes architects Rem Kohlhaas and Thomas Heatherwick, MoMA curator Paola Antonelli, luxury designer Christian Louboutin, Adam Bly from Seed Media, Tom Dixon, and Karim Rashid, among many others.
My colleagues Jan Chipchase and Robert Fabricant, and I will speak at the conference, and frog will also throw an after-party on March 9 in Delhi.
The IDF founders Rajshree Pathy and Mitra Khoubrou envision the event to be an open, cross-disciplinary conversation between designers to identify the elements that define contemporary design in India. The IDF is conceived of as a platform to improve India’s access to the global design community and help it become a leader in shaping the global design agenda.
Rotman magazine, the print and online quarterly of the Rotman School of Management, has just released its new (Winter) issue, devoted to the theme “Open.” Openness has been a buzzword for a while, ever since Henry Chesbrough wrote his seminal book on Open Innovation, but, to apply Gartner’s Hype-Cycle terminology, now it seems as if Openness has finally reached a plateau of productivity after going through years of troughs of disillusion.
We live in a connected world. This may sound like a trite statement at first glance, but like many coinages of this kind it has entered our collective vocabulary by moving straight from provocative insight to cliché to mainstream reality. And as I am headed to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the largest gathering of the wireless industry (50,000 attendees and 1,300 exhibitors), I’m probably not the only one noticing the unique historical backdrop that underlies the event this year and gives ever more credence to the seismic economic, cultural, social, and political shifts triggered by the universal power of connectivity. The Mobile World Congress, perhaps, would be more aptly dubbed World Congress in order to describe the far-flung implications of communication technology, much of which is now mobile.
This was India’s year. Obama visited, as did Sarkozy, and many other statesmen of lesser political weight or star appeal. With an annual growth rate of close to 8.9% and foreign direct investments projected to exceed $100 billion, the booming Indian economy defied the global recession. For the first time ever, eight Indian companies made it onto the Fortune 500 global list. And even PR crises like the ill-organized Commonwealth Games and political corporate scandals that were an easy target for India’s cynical media did not eclipse the nation's staggering rise – in fact, these events just seemed to magnify the spotlight. Without a doubt, the sub-continent became ready for primetime in 2010, and to many outside observers a new confidence appeared to take hold of India’s economic and intellectual elite.
I haven’t seen The Social Network yet. But the recent debate about the movie that, characteristical of a successful product, quickly transcended the original artifact and evolved into a broader cultural discourse (a “third meaning”), made me think about how dramatically my own movie experience has changed over the past 30 years. I’ve been fascinated with movies ever since I was a young boy. At the age of 10, I completely immersed myself into films such as Jungle Book, watched them again and again, learned the dialogues by heart, and accumulated an encyclopedic knowledge of the characters. A couple of years later, I became obsessed with the Bond series (I still know the entire filmography in and out). Films were my reality, and my life took place in a parallel universe for the most part.
As the New York Times Book Review reports today ("Noise Off"), three books have been published within the past month that all cover silence as a technological, cultural, and social phenomenon (my favorite line: "A person who says 'My noise is my right' basically means 'Your ear is my hole.' ").
Coincidentally, last week, frog design founder and industrial design legend Hartmut Esslinger shared with me an anecdote from his time working with then-Sony CEO Akio Morita in Tokyo in the 70s. Hartmut described how Morita had once summoned him to a large quiet room filled with wooden-bodied Sony television sets stacked up against the wall. Hartmut inquired why they'd been locked away, to which Morita replied: "They will be here for a while. The wood has to find itself."
Over the course of the past twelve months, I wrote several blog posts and articles about the Chief Meaning Officer, a role which I envision as an innovative leader who employs the new social power of marketing – provisioned by Social as a governing principle of all business interactions – to transform his/her organization (Charlene Li also elaborates on this theme in her new book Open Leadership). I presented this concept at some conferences including next in Hamburg, mostly to fellow marketers or representatives from digital agencies, and you can also hear me riff on it in this podcast produced by Dutch brand agency Energize. I received a ton of feedback: encouragement, endorsements, and consent, but also skepticism suggesting that this model might just be another marketing fad. Invited by BIDC, the Beijing Industrial Design Center, I was extremely grateful to have the opportunity to introduce the idea to a group of Chinese designers at a workshop in Beijing a few weeks ago. It was the first time I shared the Chief Meaning Officer framework in a different cultural and professional context, and it was a welcome reality check.
First of all, I had the pleasure to speak at re:publica in Berlin, perhaps the most political of all web conferences. The gathering, now in its 5th year, has evolved from a forum on digital governance to a somewhat unique and truly German hybrid of deep philosophical discourse (about the role of the individual in the digital space) and hands-on advice for practitioners. It felt a little bit like going back to college while working in a start-up. Intellectualism with street cred.
Some languages are more precise than others. German's word for disappointment, “Enttäuschung,” for example, literally translates as “disillusion” and thus implies that the prerequisite of any disappointment is excessive (and false!) expectation. As if that needed any further evidence, Apple’s iPad presentation and President Obama’s first State of the Union address last Wednesday marked the preliminary culmination of an obvious trend: disappointment as a widespread sentiment and cultural subtext at the dawn of this young decade. Both Apple and Obama are among the most powerful brands of our time and occupy that vexing space between hype and hope in the public mind. Both have zealous fans and followers, and enjoy an almost religious admiration. And both have now suffered a very public deflation, a humiliating erosion of their once unflappable appeal of invincibility, a painful rejection of love.
