Distracted #14 + An Invite To Come Live With Me

Costa Rica, Ritual Making, Reframing Opulence, The Connected Outdoors, Slow Food - Slower Delivery, Disruption Hacking

This week, in addition to a bolsita of inspiration, I want to slip in a special offer: come live with me.

Since September, I’ve been living with my family in a connected, up-beat and safe corner of Costa Rica running PSFK, Wallkit and the other projects. The town of Las Catalinas might well look like a simple, car-free, mediterranean fishing village but its also supported by 21st century infrastructure to keep digital nomads (and their families) connected. (Watch a recent video made by one of my neighbors (Ren) of the founder explaining his vision here.)

Costa Rica has a unique mix of open-borders, boundless beauty and high vigilance when it comes to Covid protocols. One day soon, we will all return to the cities but until then, why not come live, work and learn by the sea with the PSFK Co-Live experience I’ve developed at the Santarena Hotel in Guanacaste.

Find out more here: colive.psfk.com

And now…

Shared Experience

I don’t even like superhero stuff but there really is something about WandaVision. The show is altering realities and getting people talking: NYT Analysis of shared experience of using TV as an escape, Mashable and shared Covid grief, as shared water-cooler moment in Vulture.

Ritual Making

Habit forming: How to Ritualize Tea Time

On the ritual of instant noodles: how Momofuku Ando created a new way to have dinner at home.

Planting trees to commemorate heroes (Captain Sir Tom Moore) .

Celebrating a name day is officially better than celebrating a birthday: “Name days are an ancient practice, a relic of a time when birthdays were indulgences reserved for the elite. “

Reframing Opulence

The Opulence of Emptiness: representing the past in ways that connect with people today.

Jewelry designer Emefa Cole pursues the theme of ‘understated opulence’ to distill notions of “memory, loss, value and nature.”

Inspiration (to buy): Drawings made by the people who built the opulent world around us (Gehry, Hadid etc) - but when they were young.

Kinda related…. in the last note, I got distracted by soft wall furnishings and angular furniture, this week I spot angular-wall decor from London based Juliano Cordano.

The Connected Outdoors

It’s not about going for a hike anymore, it’s about going on a journey. NY State now has a 750-mile Empire State Trail and Michigan now has mega-trails (Detroit has a great new riverfront walk too).

Related: REI Co-op’s first satellite office in Issaquah, WA to be surrounded by trail networks and ‘sandwiched’ between two parks.

Slow Food, Slower Delivery

Adele Peters in FastCo wonders why can’t farmers send their crops DTC-style in the mail?

The Vegetarian's Table concept would provide a mail-fed experience for anyone who wants to start a vegetarian lifestyle.

Nestlé moved into DTC with investment in recipe-box-by-mail Simply Cook.

Related-ish: Pea is the new non-meat mushroom. Submerged sprout factories could be the new urban farms.

Disruption Hacking

The HK19 Manual - An effort to crowdsource an archive of Hong Kong protester’s know-how as a manual for future protests, “before it fades from memory.” Quartz

Culture returns to NYC, but it’s different: “From subversive newspapers to free gigs and galleries, a new kind of pandemic creativity is anti-consumerist and pro-community.”

Learning to Low-Code: an “extraordinarily disruptive episode in the enterprise digital transformation space.”

Repairs Return

Framework Laptop is upgradeable, repairable and “100% yours.”

Farfetch launches luxury restoration service in London.

Related: Los Angeles startup's new swap bank encourages consumers to think of their fashion purchases in terms of future value.

Augment Over

Prescription AR glasses are coming soon (and this is how).

Ikea turns decluttering into a game with a new augmented reality "escape room" on Snapchat

Interview with AR designer Audrey Spencer: “I think AR is the future of computing. There's so much you can do, and it can simplify your life.”

Reframe Entertainment

On playing films at home at 24 frames an hour.

New BARS app by Facebook helps aspiring rappers record their rhymes with “studio quality” vocal effects and professionally created beats.

Twitch users get Soundtrack feature

WashPo: “A guide to five can’t-miss video game vacations.”

OK. We all stopped listening to Radiohead - but maybe we would if it was set to ballet!

Film is a movie search engine currently in beta that returns screenshots from movies based on keywords like beer. Via Kottke

Communicating Better

It is interesting that in our time of video-proficient influencers, Gucci runs an illustrative campaign for its beauty products.

Analysis: Hype vs Love, Nike vs Allbirds

Fitbit partners with Deepak Chopra to launch "Mindful Method" service.

Infographic inspiration from Airbnb’s engineering team as they try to tackle visualize data timeliness

Sell Again

They want to build a huge hill in London to get people coming back to the stores on Oxford Street.

Target associates to receive Apple Store training in new concept shop-in-shops. Zones will also include with an extended assortment of accessories.

Useful analysis piece by Richard Yao from IPG Media Lab on on the growing pains being felt by retailers undergoing rapid transformation- and what can be done about it

Procter & Gamble to open a digital content-focused studio near its headquarters in Columbus, Ohio that doubles as a barbershop.

DHL trials new mobile drive up concept. I need something like that here.

Kith launches in Paris ( a little like Covid didn’t happen)

I wrote in a previoius newsletter about hotel and travel companies pivoting their services, here’s the WSJ on the spin-off Customer Service School offering by Singapore Airlines.

Diving Into Lives I Haven’t Lived

Nice piece in NYT on how the songwriters and producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff’s Black-owned label Philadelphia International Records turned a city’s aesthetic into “a movement that reverberated around the world.” (Philly should make a museum of this stuff!).

Angie Han on connecting to your past by watching films about the country you grew up in, in the (different) language you spoke in your home.

This New Yorker interview with Anthony Hopkins was arresting. His journey, his decisions to just get up and do it, the impact of outliving his peers.

“My Darling Supermarket” - A love letter to workers in retail: “The cinematographer Gustavo Almeida’s camera glides around the store like a satellite drifting through the interdimensional cosmos.” NYT Review

Why do LA residents pronounce LA places ‘wrong’? And why pronunciation changes over time?

Subscribe to Berlin’s Wolf Kino movie theater and watch online what another country thinks is avant-garde.

Final Update

How to learn when you age. (Qk answer - vary things up while you learn through repetition. Or quicker answer - teach someone something you have yet to learn).

Architect draws fantasy house each day for a year, imagining different ways of life that might take place within the detached house. [More at Designboom] Maybe we should all do similar projects to push our creative imagination?

You saw all the videos from the Future of Retail conference I ran last week, yeah???

Read ‘La economía del aburrimiento’ - partly to reflect on what happened but mainly because you need to improve your Spanish before you come here.

Piers

PSFK / Wallkit / Retail Innovation Week /Distracted