Hey.
As always, hoping that this distracts you enough from the news-cycle and inspires you to make a little progress personally, professionally and within our community.
Getting More Outside-In
IKEA Virtual Greenhouse offers virtual workshops to help people create a home sanctuary to live more sustainably and thrive in these exceptional times. Check their Life At Home report too. (Related - how the home office movement is driving sales at the big-box retailer).
Did you know that the drive for nature-based solutions are “among the cheapest ways of absorbing and storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the additional benefits the protection of wildlife??”
For those who have to go to work, I’m sure a good few of us would want to work in a plant-filled outdoor-indoor office in Brooklyn.
Back up: Why we need more dirt beneath our feet and under our fingernails.
Finding Alt Rev $treams
Zoom is now a platform with its own app marketplace.
Michelin Star NYC restaurant offers $275 meal kit to prep at home.
Singapore Airlines extends its business by selling stuff to its customer base when they’re not on a plane.
New job: professional bridesmaid.
Attention Grabbing
As we’re all in the attention business, it’s worth checking out the new Google search updates. (Everyone’s fave: You hum it, I’ll find it feature)
The MeToo movement as a platform for learning
To get folks back on cruise-lines, Singapore is running 7 hour trips to nowhere. (That said, I don’t know if I’d go through the pain of a Covid test for it)
Slightly awkward: Italian artist forgot to say he wasn’t Chinese and captured the attention of the nation’s Gen Z
Reasons Why
Why Has Premier League Scoring Skyrocketed? (Come on, Zaha!)
Why Nintendo? Nice analysis piece in the WashPo about the firm: “Nintendo’s sustained success in times of crisis is due to the simple belief that joy matters.”
How Google’s moonshot team, X, predicts the future.
Cory Doctorow in the Guardian: ‘Technologists have failed to listen to non-technologists… there’s a quantitative fallacy that if you can’t do maths on it, you can just ignore it.’
Retail, Resale
IKEA will buy your furniture back for 50% of what you paid for - then resell it themselves.
Kia has a fashion-forward promotion - with a sustainable project with garments made out of old auto scraps.
Reminds me a little of the Land Rover re-furb offering: Bang & Olufsen respond to nerd culture by refurbishing a sought-after range of vinyl players.
Tweaks
KFC sells take-out food in self-heating packaging.
Pizza Hut is turning its boxes into fussball game.
Someone reworked the humble battery.
A look at how Julia Koerner and 3D printing will change fashion.
Huawei could create a real alternative to Android OS
How Google is investing in AI driven robots-tractors for computational agriculture.
Talking robots…. KLM is taking them onboard to serve you food.
Return To The City
Watch: Why the arts make cities.
A NYT Tour of the Punks and Poets of the East Village.
Watch: “American Utopia,” Spike Lee’s film version of David Byrne’s dance show.
Alternatively, Dancing Through Harlem might be your thing.
(thx Swissmiss)
Experience More
London has a five story wizard-themed house to visit. When you can visit. .
I don’t know why this distracts me but it does: Curtains to shape spaces - At a coffee house in LA, at a learning environment in Rotterdam.
Store design inspiration: Mono-color egg cafe in Mexico City.
How Ski Resorts are going to get contactless this season.
Levi’s starts rolling out its small format stores with tailoring and endless aisles.
Folks getting most of their ‘shopping kicks’ these days just by turning up at the curb.
Design Language
Buck LA sweats the design details to help launch a new electronics brand from Amazon.
Pinned-butterfly boxes as city murals.
Nike’s most cutting edge design team uses movement data to inform fashion design for their ‘Every Stitch Considered’ range - (Nike occasion-based marketing fodder: check the Dia de Muertos range)
I’m not really an interior design nerd these days but there was something about these cylinder designs from Waka Waka….
More messaging inspiration: Designers use ‘victory poses’ to encourage corporate wellness through team sports “without being cheesy or stale?”
Benedetto Bufalino is a fun and provocative artist I follow. Often his work is connected to the rethinking how we interact with vehicles. This video (in French) gives an overview of his work.
React/Recoil: “Anti-ASMR” art by Polly Morgan.
We have 350 reports in the PSFK library right now so I’m always scanning for design language inspiration. Earlier this week, I shared this work from Xtian Miller with my team.
Parting Shots
I talked ‘Twitch is the new YouTube’ in the last email. Here’s another example: Unfinished Business: Race and Equity in America, a live summit with Arnold Schwarzenegger (??) that runs on Twitch Friday through Sunday.
I talked helmets vs masks in the last email. The NYT followed up with a similar story.
Apols for typos and mixing up tech firms like I did last week. If you didn’t find a link you wanted to click on by now - here’s my hail-mary: Dog booth helps dogs take selfies (for treats). C’mon…..
Piers Fawkes
PSFK / Wallkit / Retail Innovation Week (is coming in Jan!)