74FDC

Ferrari soap dishes?

A.I. really can make the creative process lightning fast. 😇

Or "squircle" from the 2011 Fiat Panda?

Besides helping the wearer look like a 1960's mechanic, miner, or factory worker (maybe unionised), The message on the label reads like locker room motivation. Both seemingly far from the cultural stereotype of digital professionals, have maybe gradually converged unnoticed. Or is it just low hanging irony?

Does "winning" imply creating loss and losers? Who are the losers left in the winners wake? And consider what will they have lost, for you to win?

Should winning be applied to everything, or can it be limited to sport and inconsequential things?

Who is this jacket for? And was Shyam Sankar maybe a college athlete?

Not checking your phone, can feel a bit like not wearing shoes.

Can there really be a similarity to how we experience footwear, phones and the Internet, and how each affect us?

In the modern world connecting to the internet, gives us peace of mind, helping us to feel a little more comfortable, performing and protected, like putting on a pair of shoes. And maybe also to disconnect from the hard reality of pressure, cold and dirt, for our feet and our minds alike?

Both can also help us run faster through life, appear wealthier, or taller, more attractive? But like thick cushy soles and overbuilt shoe uppers, they can also make us more desensitised to the contours and the nuances of reality. Bad posture? And if too rigid, our feet like minds can become less flexible, or articulated.

There are also advantages to being barefooted, or internet free.

For many of us, only on holidays and especially the beach, is only when we can feel comfortable without either phone, or footwear. Although some still prefer to wear water shoes, or flip flops.

OK, and sometimes we walk barefoot at home too.

Looking far back in history, the human transition from walking completely barefoot to wearing footwear for each waking moment was probably also gradual. *And going back further still, we were quadrupeds, and metaphorically speaking?

At first footwear, like mobile phones was probably used just for long trips, then evertime you left the house and just until quite recently indoors too.

Will we one day become connected online for as long as we wear footwear each day?

Does anyone wear socks in bed, and who will prefer to stay lightly connected to cyberspace, even as they sleep?

Or what thoughts do I wish to create?

For example, lots of languages have grammatical gender. So every noun gets assigned a gender, often masculine or feminine, and these genders differ across languages. Could this have any consequence for how people think? It turns out that's the case. So if you ask German and Spanish speakers to describe a bridge. Bridge happens to be grammatically feminine in German, but grammatically masculine in Spanish.

And German speakers are more likely to say bridges are beautiful, elegant, these stereotypically feminine words. Whereas Spanish speakers will be more likely to say they're strong or long, applying masculine words". 

In a digital world, physical and essential products like food, stoves pants and shoes will become just that. Inexpensive, plain and just enough for existence. But our visual and auditory life will be the opposite, maximal and digital.

"Let them eat social media"....

Or maybe its just my too convenient, lazy projection of how many already live today.

Following an industrial collapse, global society will probably still be too diverse to transition to such a clean cut, digital existence.

Back in the 1980s, there were three big car companies in the U.S. With Toyota and other Japanese companies trying to enter the U.S. market. GM had a challenge, because Toyota's cars were cheaper and higher quality than their own. So they lobbied the government to put in place a tariff to make it harder to import Japanese cars. Then Toyota approached and asked if they could start a joint venture and own a factory together? Where Toyota, would learn if they could make their cheap, high-quality cars in the US. And GM, would learn to make such great cars.

GM agreed, but purposely gave Toyota a factory in Northern California called Numi because it was a wasteland. A town where the bars were the fullest at 7 a.m. with people getting drunk before work. Sometimes so few people showed up to work, they couldn't even start the line. It was just a disaster.

Toyota took that factory and it kept the same workers who were known to be incredibly toxic and a demotivated culture. They then flew everybody to Japan for two weeks and taught them their methodology. GM methodology was stand in one place, turn a screw, do the same thing. It was entirely tactical. But the Toyota methodology was designed for individuals to come up with ideas, spots issues and make improvements.

Toyota was famous for its cord that hangs above every station. And if you spotted a quality issue and pulled on that cord, music that you had chosen would play throughout the factory. But you could also pull the cord because you had an idea; if this tool was shaped differently, this thing would work better etc.. Then a manager would come over, take your idea and have it mocked up in the back. Later you could test it and if it worked great and if it didn't, don't worry. So people felt like they weren't there just there to turn a screw, but also to think. There's a video of people leaving the training saying this was the first time that I've ever been treated like a human being. The same people had dramatically different feelings about their work and dramatically different performance outcomes. And within just a few months, that factory started producing cars in half the time. It went from 40 to 20 hours to make a car. Also their quality improved by 30%. And the motivation of the factory had become dramatically different.

So GM sent their managers to take photos and help figure out how they set up their own factory in the same way. But while they documented how people painted that thing yellow, or put that cord there, the employees just laughed because they said it wasn't about the stuff. It was about the culture that was built around the stuff.

The same people, just in a different system.

Because the closer your proposals looks to being finished, the more feedback they invite on the wrong things.

The profile is too low, mesh is too open, the rubber too shiny, the colour is wrong etc.

Management, or clients start critiquing the details before they've even bought the idea. And suddenly you're defending details instead of selling a concept.

So de-finish those A.I designs, to look looser and less resolved. More like sketches and renderings than realistic finished shoe studio photos. Or adding context like a model, or living space, maybe also risks confusing the presentation with a catalog and ageing the design by a year.

Because sometimes when you show less, people can focus more. And engage with the idea, not the details that you'll define later.

But it also does something else. It invites them in. They feel part of the process, shaping the work rather than just judging it. So although we finally have the tools to show everything, sometimes restraint is the move. Because the goal isn't to prove that you can make it. It's to sell the idea.