It all started with the encounter of two traditional industries: incense of Awaji Island and matches of Harima. These two traditional industries of Hyogo Prefecture first encountered each other in 2011. The collaboration started with the idea of an incense that could be lit like striking a match and was followed by 3 years of trial and error, an aromatic product with properties of strength and fragrance was developed, which did not break even when struck like a match… The name of products and packaging were developed to convey the sensibility of today’s Japan. All those things were ‘designed’ to create a new way of enjoying fragrance.
… Women cited safety from gropers, as well as not having to tolerate various smells. Men cited not having to worry about false accusations of being a groper. However, passengers complained about further overcrowding in mixed cars, and feared that women who ride mixed cars would be putting themselves at more risk than before (Japan)
… Women-only compartments were introduced on the Leipzig-to-Chemnitz regional train in 2016. Reactions from passengers were mixed. While some welcomed the measure as it made women feel safer, others thought that separating genders was “something from the past” and a “backward solution” (Germany)
To quarantine women from men aims to protect female passengers from male criminals. However, to do so *accentuates* gender differences. Claire Cohen wrote at Telegraph,
… Women-only carriages are an admission of defeat; they normalise sexual assault and tell the world that, rather than tackling sex offenders, the answer is to simply remove women from the equation – as if it is somehow our fault… It sounded ridiculous because it is, and it is exactly the same mentality that thinks hiding women away is a solution to sexual assault – not just plain sexism.
Nordic countries address gender issues differently. They attempt to *mitigate* gender differences. One example is all gender toilet widely available in Copenhagen, Denmark. Women and men equally wait in queue outside the toilets.
… Technology lacks flexibility. When we’re interacting with a person and we’re having trouble understanding something, the person can adjust to us. If we’re having a misunderstanding, they can help clarify it. Technology really can’t do either of these things.
… A person has the ability to delight us or disappoint us. It’s really hard for a technology to ever delight, however, because it’s standardized and is built on a set of rules. But it is possible for technologies to disappoint us.
I have met a good example about how to overcome the above mentioned two weaknesses. This is Neal’s Yard Dairy, a cheese store at the Borough market in London, UK. In this store, customers should talk to the person over the counter to buy cheese. While having conversation with another human being over the counter, they learn what to buy and are relieved or excited. Only people can educate AND delight us at the same time. Kiosks cannot.
Macau has many tourist spots including Senado Square and Ruins of St. Pauls. However, I enjoyed a shopping district at The Venetian Macau the most. As the name suggests, a man-made Italian city exists in the hotel.
When I first entered this district, something unnatural grabbed my attention; canal is narrow, floor is shiny, and lights are bright. These are clearly different from what I saw or expected in Venice.
However, about 30 minutes later, I saw myself paying attention to something good: cool air, blue sky, and sailor’s singing a song. Then, it did not take more than an hour to feel like I was in Venice. I was surprised by how soon I became immersed with a fake world or, more precisely, a human-made store environment (probably because some people took a ride on the gondola?).
As many of us live in cities, we are often surrounded by human-made environments. What if our thoughts and behaviors are dictated by artificial environment?
(CNN) — Everyone at Hanoi’s humble Cafe Giang however, is after something more than just a caffeine fix. They’ve come for “cà phê trúng,” or egg coffee, a Hanoi specialty in which a creamy soft, meringue-like egg white foam is perched on dense Vietnamese coffee. While destinations across the city now serve it, this cafe claims to have invented it.
There are hot and cold versions. The former is served as a a yellow concoction in a small glass. It’s consumed with a spoon and tastes almost like a coffee flavored ice cream — more like a dessert than coffee. The hot version comes resting in a small dish of hot water to maintain its temperature. The strong coffee taste at the bottom of the cup seeps through the egg — the yellow layer on top — and is quite thick and sweet, though not sickly.
A tasty coffee with creamy foam impressed me. However, I was more impressed by the low stools. In this cafe, people bent their knees and pressed their hips back on the stools, much like doing a squat exercise.
I believe, we are not only what we eat but also “how we move.” I learned this only after having gone through painful days to form a new habit such as moving computer mouse using left hand or doing computer tasks at standing desk. I suspect Vietnamese people, at least, look healthy because they develop a healthy posture habit. I may need to import their low stools to improve my bad posture habit.
I followed map in Prague, Czech Republic. I crossed a bridge (Legions’ Bridge), climbed up a tower (Petrin Tower), and drank beer at a local brewery (Strahov Monastery Brewery). However, I went to one place most tourists are not interested in. I visited a design exhibition held at a convention center (Výstaviště Praha Holešovice).
Professional designers opened their booths and invited visitors in the convention center. I listened to presentations, tested products, talked to designers, and bought a few items.
Afterwards, I became curious about this product and googled “Love Magenta.” I expected to find a person who loves the purplish red color and sell 3D food printers. Surprisingly, Love Magenta is the online store of the Deutsche Telekom. The website of “Love Magenta” says:
Magenta – so much more than just Deutsche Telekom’s corporate color, the most important element of our corporate identity.
But Magenta means even more to us: It represents our attitude towards life. Our employees show their pride in our brand with our everyday products. We showcase our favorite color perfectly in our online shop: sometimes bold, sometimes understated – but always stylish and up to date.
The shop offers a constantly changing range of high-quality products, including fashion, accessories, and gadgets. What these items have in common is the color Magenta, of course – and the love and attention dedicated to each detail. All products are designed and produced exclusively for our shop. This ensures the highest possible quality, and gives our designers complete freedom to create truly unique items. It’s never been easier for our employees and customers to express their love for Magenta in so much style.
Take a look – we’re sure you’ll find something you like.
Color is an effective marketing tool and some colors are stylish. Silver Bang & Olufsen speakers and white Balmuda toasters are eye catching. However, most success cases come from product manufacturers. How can service companies link themselves with stylish colors when they have no tangible, visible products? Deutsche Telekom gave an answer; Really New Products (RNPs) such as 3D food printers help service companies link their colors and styles. In the near future, other Really New Products such as wearable devices, voice recognition devices, or drones will be effective marketing tools for service companies to promote their own colors in stylish ways.
Japanese draw, Chinese speak, and Koreans write. This is my temporary conclusion about how people communicate in three countries. I *suspect* Japanese draw because they intend to help readers understand messages correctly (receiver-oriented), Chinese speak because they find typing Chinese characters difficult (sender-oriented), and Koreans write because these two reasons do not apply (message-oriented, maybe).
Since Japanese like drawing, cartoon is frequently spotted in Japan. At one train station in Fukuoka, for instance, cartoon boards say that people should not throw away cigarette butts, riders should not sit down with their legs spread, women should not put up cosmetics in the train, and riders should not open up their newspaper wide.
Although cartoon is easy to understand, I wonder whether cartoon works for Chinese listeners or Korean readers.
Taipei is hot in summer. After sweating an hour, I ordered an iced coffee at 羊毛與花 Youmoutoohana Coffee. To my surprise, it served me a glass of coffee with a metal straw. After sipping coffee through it, I became a huge fan of metal straw. This summer, I will buy and bring a few metal straws to office with me to enjoy coffee more and consume plastics less.
I keep these in my tote bag (if you are worried about them getting dirty, I suggest a pencil pouch), and whip them up out whenever I’m at a coffee shop. Once at Starbucks, a talkative barista commented on my straw. “Hey, I’m with you,” he told me. “You’d hate to work here. You see how wasteful people are from behind this counter.” I’ll be gifting them to all of my friends for World Oceans Day on June 8.
Thai designers make interesting experimentation. At a department store in Bangkok, I found several stationary items and kitchen utensils designed by Qualy, seems to be a local Thai design company. Although this company introduced a series of interesting products including owl-shaped salt and pepper shaker or bear-shaped one, the most interesting one is mushroom-shaped magnetic.
Shiitake is a mushroom native to East Asia and consumed in many Asian countries. It is considered a medicinal mushroom in some forms of traditional medicine. Qualy website says,
Shiitake magnet Make sure you don’t put these in your soup. They are actually mushroom shaped magnets. And not just any mushroom, they are shiitake mushrooms, to remind you to seize opportunity. Just place them on any metal surface to secure your notes. It’s like picking mushrooms from a field each time you remove a magnet.
Although I do not know why shiitake mushroom is related with seizing an opportunity, the form is certainly eye-catching and attractive enough to open wallet.
In Shenzhen, China, people ride bicycles almost for free because bicycle sharing companies such as Ofo (yellow) and Mobike (orange) compete each other aggressively.
Thanks to the competition, renting and returning bicycles is extremely convenient. When I subscribed Mobike, I could use app to search for available bicycles nearby. When I met a lonely bicycle on a street, I simply scanned its QR code to unlock and ride it. When I finished my trip, I parked it anywhere I wanted and then scanned its QR code one more time.
Certainly, aggressive competition raises numerous problems. For instance, some bicycles are broken, others are dirty, and the others are even dumped out in the woods! However, competition solves a challenging problem that other bicycle friendly cities failed to address, that is, bicycle theft. Since bicycles are for free in this city, no one is interested in owning or stealing them. A sharing economy, when it truly comes true, could change how we value a product or service.
Psychologists have long claimed that people do not know the value of a product or a service. Instead, people shape their preferences on the spot. For instance, when Ariely, Loewenstein and Prelec asked 146 U.C. Berkeley undergraduate students whether they wanted to attend a free poetry recitation, the percentage of respondents willing to attend the free poetry recitation was 35% when they had first been asked if they would pay to attend the recital, but only 8% when they had first been asked whether they would attend the recital in exchange for pay. As written in the Mark Twain’s novel Tom Sawyer, Tom “had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.”
This paper challenges the common assumption that economic agents know their tastes. After reviewing previous research showing that valuation of ordinary products and experiences can be manipulated by non-normative cues, we present three studies showing that in some cases people do not have a pre-existing sense of whether an experience is good or bad-even when they have experienced a sample of it.
