Posts filed under ‘global’
Eating the planet
Trevor Harvey writes:
I contributed to an event run by one of our food retail clients this week, and one of the other speakers showed some pictures from Hungry Planet, a photo-essay (“30 families, 24 countries, 600 meals”) about who eats what around the world.
Time magazine did a selection of the families, with some data on their food budgets and their favourite meals, and there’s also a audio feature from the US National Public Radio show All Things Considered with an associated web page which has the full weekly food shops from four of the 30 families (Darfur, Gemany, the USA, and China).
Looking through the pictures, it seems as if – with the obvious exception of the very poor – that those with more money for their food budgets are likely to have worse nutrition, at least judging by the amount of processed foods on display. They have less fresh food and an awful lot more packaging. In contrast, those with smaller budgets tend to have favourite family meals (the richer families talk about ‘favourite foods’ – processed again – rather than favourite meals). At risk of romanticising, the poorer families also seem to be smiling a lot more.
One of the trends we’re noticing at the moment is that the proportion of income spent on food is going up, for the first time in three decades. This is partly because basic prices are going up. Although it’s a complex story, it’s possible to imagine that a combination of price increases, the pursuit of wellbeing, and a desire for the more authentic might mean that the more affluent will start shifting their food budgets to more natural foodstuffs – with the health benefits that would follow.
The photo above by Peter Menzel, taken from The Hungry Planet, shows the Melander family, from Bargteheide, Germany, with a week’s worth of food.
14 March 2008 at 10:00 am thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Cultural values, design, and global production
Eleanor Cooksey writes:
I recently read WPP’s annual journal of marketing insights, Atticus, and noted an interesting point towards the end of an article called ‘Getting the little things right’, by a team at the digital agency Digit, in London. [Not currently online, unfortunately].
They discuss how product and service design, in particular for electronic media, tends to reflect ‘Californian’ values, which include ‘pragmatism (a can-do attitude and belief in prototyping), audacity (focus on innovation and the pioneering spirit) and a certain lightness of touch (playfulness and optimism)’. Perhaps not surprising, they say, since so many user interface principles came out of Silicon Valley in the ’80s and ’90s. When one thinks of Apple, for example, it’s easy to see how these values translate into product experience.
But users in other regions expect an experience which reflects their important values. In Europe, this might include ‘conviviality (social not solitary) and quality (craftsmanship, individualism, local provenance). Nokia, for example, has recently shown prototype handsets which embed ‘green values’ and social responsibility.
But as the global design market becomes more integrated, it may become increasingly hard in the future to work out whose values are inherent in services and products.
Image ‘ipod’ copyright 2007 Apple Inc.
Image ‘eco phone’ copyright 2008 Nokia.
India is now outsourcing outsourcing
Brian writes:
The New York Times recently reported that India is now outsourcing outsourcing- a number of large Indian companies are hiring workers and opening offices not only in developing countries, but even in Northern American cities in some cases. The looping of outsourcing back to the developed West where average costs of supplies and wages are much higher can be mind-boggling as it appears to be counter-intuitive to the conventional wisdom of cost minimization. But large companies like India’s Infosys Technolgies and Wipro are thinking beyond just wages and cost reductions. By gaining a comparative advantage in managing labor flows across continents, these companies are thriving to be “global matchmakers in outsourcing,” accumulating human capital that are crucial in serving local and specific knowledge to distant markets and clients.
The report illustrates the phenomenon but using an example of a company in the United States paying an Indian vendor 7,000 miles away to supply it with Mexican engineers working just 150 miles south of the US border. Now, outsiders may find it absurd for the company to outsource so far away for a service that is so close to home, but if the Indian firm can render the same service effectively at the equivalent or cheaper prices, then this transaction goes to show the lessening in importance of physical distance for many global service-based industries. With today’s communication capabilities, the world is perhaps flatter than we once thought. After all, nothing can really be that surprising in the world of outsourcing after that one Californian newspaper outsourced two journalists in India for reporting local news in fair Pasadena.
3 October 2007 at 2:52 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Secrets of Nokia’s innovation success
Andrew Curry writes:
The Core 77 design blog has a good piece on the reasons for Nokia’s innovation success.
In summary they are:
- the maths – go where the markets are (Nokia has increased its lead over competitors in the emerging markets yet again
- design it for the markets you’re selling in (Nokia has a design lab in Bangalore; in emerging markets features which enable phone sharing may be more useful than megapixels)
- ‘Show the people’ – do the marketing at the right level (Nokia has been using promotional vehicles, literally: vans and even railway carriages.
