Five Ideas That Matter

We are not frequent posters – opting instead to get a post up here when we have an observation that helps the underlying argument. Hope that explains the radio silence.

Over the past week or so I’ve been trying to think how to get back to the core argument. This goes something like:

There are profound changes underway in the economy and society and they are taking place at a point where a set of new ideas meets a set of new practices. We think we can understand the probable success of the new practices by understanding the power (emerging popularity) of the ideas.

The image is of the Sintesi concept car from Pininfarina. The picture  is an example of new fabrication technology (one of the big ideas in auto) that represents one of these joining points in ideas and economic activity. It offers up an example of how resilience (a key element of new ecological metaphors or bioconsciousness)  and personalisation and customer-driven configuration (the ability to create or hack what I wish to) meet. Here is a couple more images:

So the obvious question is – why is it so interesting? The answer lies in the involvement of Materialize, who specialise in Freeform Manufacturing. Here’s how they describe their speciality:

Freeform Manufacturing uses additive technologies (also referred to as 3D printing technologies), fully automated processes that don’t require molds and thus allow a virtually unlimited freedom in design. Today, these technologies are increasingly used in the production of concept cars. Gradually, this production method will be applied for the production of final cars as well.

I came across the Pininfarina example at 3D Print. The link is this: desktop fabrication that can power the design and data output to make complex objects, cheaply, is upon us. Materialize’s facilities are desktop factories writ large.

In fact the DeskTop Factory project and others are aiming at providing that facility.

The interesting development (or evolution) in personal fabrication (well not quite personal but certainly local at $5000 a pop) is self reproduction in fabbing technologies.

Inevitably that idea is driven by an open source community. I think we are going to be surprised by what can be self-made and at the cost. The dream of self-fabricating things like autos is definitely one for the future but how absurd sane or is it?

I had the pleasure a few years back of seeing a few of the micro-cars created by impoverished engineers in the 1940s. For the most part I was looking at German microcars. They were made out of whatever an engineer could find in the rubble. Here’s an image from the Museum of MicroCars (mostly models from the 1940s and 1950s). MicroCars were homemades and they were production models. Their distinguishing feature was a skilled engineer who knew the product’s totality.

We might never get back to that but future production systems offer an opportunity for people to reinvent their interests and rebuild their communities. The term “bubble car” by the way seems to come from the aircraft cockpit inspiration for these early post War designs. Finally – talking about aircraft cockpits here are two pictures of the 1953 Messerschmitt KR175,

If I was a CEO or leader of a significant organisation, my response to claims that my company is threatened by, say Chinese competitors or climate change or indeed recession, would be, no: it is either safeguarded or threatened by my ability or inability to understand the changing patterns and dynamics of social interaction.

Everyone around me is equally affected by how people’s intentions change and what that says about their shared thought processes – the mutual future we are always building. Not understanding the speed with which people now recreate futures is why politicians are failing.

There is good harmless fun trend projecting and a couple of years back pure blogging listed a bunch of sites that do it well.

You can review those sites here. And we will review them all here soon.

My apoplectic response to apocalyptic trend spotting and critique goes something like this. Here is a dead easy futures portfolio.

1. The recession will last for a hundred years and you are all going to die. Pessimism sells well – in fact the author of Buyology Martin Lindstrom has shown the science of buying and selling is at one with fear. There is no shortage of futurology that tells folks it is all getting worse and will continue to do so until you listen to me.

2. The second version of futurology goes like this – Gen A (it could be x, y or z) is the ultimate slacker generation and determined to prove its slackiness is purer than the slackers who came before them (the mathematical formula is Gen = n [tusg]p where p = the present and tusg = the ultimate slacker generation.

3. The third category of doom apocalypse thinking is a combination of arguments that all say the condition of the world spells a sticky end soon. Climate, ascent of China, population growth, health care spending.

Behind each of these arguments lies a formulaic response which goes something like – if we get smarter, if we rely become more creative, adaptable, flexible, innovative (innovation is the new progress) then we can just overcome these problems.

When Chris and I started thinking abut metatrends one of the first things we noticed however is how well, how quickly and how imaginatively people are adapting to new circumstances. The brain and behaviour are the things we can change very quickly – curious fact, people continually talk about having attitudes and/or new ways of doing things in their DNA – my understanding is that genetic change takes about 40,000 years to work through in humans. Very little changes in our DNA – other than it becoming damaged or mutates.

It stands to a little bit of reason that change is therefore mostly social and interactive between people and the web is the place a lot of that interaction now takes place.

Here is a case in point During the recession the number of money saving blogs has been increasing as have their readers. This comes at a time when, the FT recently pointed out, old fashioned mutualism is dying out rapidly enough that Governments are trying to save it. American thrifts have had their day and European mutual societies got the high risk, high reward bug. Read all about it here.

By way of contrast we see a different mutualism growing. It is based around using the web as a source of mutual support and the primary weapon is not money but information.

Having said that, money is a focus of a new generation of peering systems, led of course by the ZOPA model. Even here in money, to date, information rules and includes the likes of wesabe and many more on that model.

In other words the adaptation of social DNA (the information repository for persistence) is well under way. We have written about it recently but only in private client papers. Hopefully we can approach the issue publicly soon. Understanding these trends and what they mean, before the opposition do is more important than the thought apocalypse.

The “individualisation of society” meme has been popular since at least the 19th century. In previous generations individualisation was widely thought of as a negative, a tearing apart of community and a route to alienation. Now it is a kind of springboard for the creative life. Individualisation is closely associated with experiences that are more personalised or that help create a stronger personal narrative for a consumer. This is a curious transformation but a happy one.

Individualisation appears to fly in the face of the more collectivist notion that is undoubtedly out there.  Personalisation and individualization are significant not only because they embody the shift from product to service but also because of their impact on the supply chain. Zazzle.com, the online personalization service has a product returns ration below 1%.  The Consumer Electronics Association of American calculated a decade ago that returns were running at 20% of sales.

Online references to individualisation outnumber references to collectivism by about 2:1 so far in 2009. In comparison references to collaboration outnumber references to individualisation 200:1 in the same period.

The combination of American and non-American spellings of personaliZation exceed the number of references enjoyed by online community (1,960,000: 1.500,000) and taken together customisation, individualization and personalisation outnumber “online community” 4:1.