Rebecca Nash writes:

‘Public facing’ and ‘academic’ are two personal attributes that often don’t go together. But the IIPS was fortunate to host this rare breed at a breakfast briefing this week. Professor Danny Dorling both conducts groundbreaking research on patterns of place and social change, and makes sure it gets covered by the media (here and here and here.)

Danny’s presentation at the IIPS was on the evidence of the strong links between poor public services and local inequalities – part of the IIPS’s ongoing conversation about what role research and public services play in improving people’s lives. Worrying as much of his evidence is, his talk was also a hopeful call to action. Despite the correlation between local deprivation and poor services he argued two points:  First, if we take a look at recent data from The Futures Company, there is public will for social change and social action - and permission for radical change. Second, government has the tools to improve things on local levels and to stop inequalities from continuing to spread on a national scale.

BMRB Social Research’s Head of Methods Joel Williams argued that research can support the policy and service delivery changes that Danny urges – and looked at some different research methods. He identified new research strategies for the places that most need them: for example, opening up administrative data bases in their original forms, targeting surveys in areas with the greatest variety of life outcomes, local authorities working together on common policy interventions, and more facilitation of local area modelling by those conducting national surveys.

Danny’s assumption that government could provide most of the solutions was challenged by Professor Paul Wiles, Head of Government Social Research. He raised questions about  the persistence of long-term, local inequalities, and the way in which these shaped long-term social and cultural perceptions of poorer areas. In short, there are limits to government power and policy making, especially in the face of other powerful agents of change (communities, families, the housing market, and more).

Big questions about government, community, and public and social capital at 8.30 in the morning. But as we only begin to see the effects of economic crash, these issues are only going to get sharper over the coming year - or more.

The picture shows Diego Rivera’s mural, ‘Contradictions between Rich and Poor 01″. Sheffield University’s ‘Changing UK’ report, co-authored by Danny Dorling, can be downloaded as a pdf from here. The IIPS is a co-venture between The Futures Company and BMRB which develops and promotes the use of citizen insight to support the transformation of public service delivery in the UK.

Andrew Curry writes:

Alice Rawsthorne has an interesting article on the impact of recession on design in the International Herald Tribune. It seems it’s all good news. This shouldn’t be a surprise; innovation thrives on scarcity and constraint, and design is no different. And certainly the historical evidence bears this out. The Bauhaus and the Modernist movements emerged in the 1920s and ’30s, and the Italian post-war design boom from the depths of its post-war austerity.

The current financial and economic crisis requires that we think again about how our systems work, and - as she writes - designers excel at simplifying complex issues and collaborating with other disciplines. Rawsthorne anticipates that designers will help companies to cut costs by thinking about new ways to use materials and by imagining new service models (for example part-ownership or ‘renalism’ rather than outright purchase, as is happening with the Parisian Velib bicycle initiative - or Streetcar and Zipcar, come to that).

Beyond this, there are whole new approaches to service and system design, and she commends the work of Live|Work, which has redesigned support services, for example in its work in Sunderland, to put the user at the centre and access resources from multiple agencies rather than being caught between them.(It also works in the private sector).

The final bit of good news? The market for expensively designed objects has tanked. Half of the lots at Sotheby’s design auction last month went unsold.

Thanks to core 77 for the tip. The picture of a Velib station at the top of this post is from an article about the Velib scheme in Post-Carbon Cities.

Jake Goretzki writes:

Jake Goretzki writes:
The world of brands has always had a lively lexicon (those ‘wheels’, ‘onions’, ‘keys’ and ‘prisms’), but I came across a new face recently when I was listening to BBC World Service’s ‘Global Business‘ - the evocatively named ‘zombie brand‘.

Zombie brands are dead and delisted brands which retain emotional value, decades after they’ve been buried - and can, with clever handling, be reanimated by adapting yesterday’s positioning to new trends while retaining core truths.

The example which the programme cites is ‘Brim’, a decaf coffee in the US with an unforgettable jingle (something about ‘goodness to the brim’) that has, apparently, been resurrected as a vitamin-enhanced coffee. Brim, it is claimed, had been retained in the American collective memory as an idea of a coffee ‘that you could drink and it would not be bad for you…even good actually’. The Ford Taurus and Coke Tab also fit the bill.

In Eastern Europe, countless decommissioned Communist-era favourites, many gradually returning, behave in similar ways. Back in the UK, I hear the wailing of our own brand zombies - and nostalgia websites are teeming with them. Can it be long indeed before the dream return to the shelves of Spangles, this time single source and fairtrade? My hopes are still alive; sorry, undead.

The programme, presented by the incomparable Peter Day, can now be heard online.

The Brim poster at the top of the post is courtesy of Gasoline Alley Antiques.

by Giles Powdrill

Counterfeiting has, in all likelihood, been around for as long as currency itself but as the exchange of goods and services has become more complex, so has the trade in fakes. The forger’s business goes well beyond banknotes, art and documents these days. Everything from aircraft parts and microchips to pharmaceuticals and even baby milk powder can be, and is, reproduced for an illicit profit.

Globalisation and the internet means that our exposure to the phony has increased dramatically in recent times (the catchily-named International Anti-counterfeiting Coalition says the problem has grown 100-fold in the past two decades). The Counterfeiting Intelligence Bureau, run by the International Chamber of Commerce, estimates that the fakes business accounts for between 5 - 7% of total world trade, worth around $600 billion a year. And while it’s generally in the interests of such organisations to talk up the threat from fakes, by way of comparison, global advertising revenue runs at around $70 billion a year.

Asia is undoubtedly one of the principal sources of the world’s fake brands, while China is the largest contributor. Counterfeit products could account for a sixth or more of all products made in China, representing 8% of China’s US$2.6 trillion GDP. For the largest global brands it’s a large and growing concern. It’s also quite a tough business problem, since they typically hope to expand in markets which apparently originate much of the imitation merchandise.

And much of the anecdotal evidence suggests that in a post-modern world consumers are getting more tolerant about fakes. A survey last year by a British law firm deduced that one in eight Britons had bought a fake handbag or watch over the previous twelve months. The three most-purchased fake products purchased were Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Burberry.

These cultural attitudes are likely to be reinforced as economies stall. Louis Vuitton, according to the 2008 brandz study by our sister WPP company Millward Brown, has a brand value of $25.7bn. This is a substantial figure, and only a small dent in this from the sales of fakes is a significant problem. It seems more likely that they’ll have to learn to live with it, as Microsoft did when it tolerated copies of Windows circulating in China because it realised it might build a long-term market for the company’s software. There is some good news on the consumer side: the survey mentioned earlier found that almost a third of the buyers of fakes said that the experience made them more likely to buy the real thing.

Perhaps the lesson to be learned is from judo rather than boxing; to find ways to work with the grain of the counterfeit business, rather than trying to confront it.

The image at the top of the page is from the Chinese site jjunda.net, which has a whole gallery of pictures of fake products.

Andy Stubbings writes:

One of the great lines in the film Network is when the news anchor Howard Beale covers the news of the 1970s recession by telling viewers,

“I don’t have to tell you things are bad! Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression!”

But in the days of 24-hour rolling news channels and multi-supplement newspapers, such brevity is no longer good enough. There’s a correlation between the amount of actual ‘news’ anyone can report, their level of knowledge of the subject, and the amount of cliche they generate. The formula for this is probably M x I = C, where M is how massive the story is, I is the journalists’ general level of ignorance, and C is the volume of cliche. There are even blogs which celebrate the best crunch cliches. Here’s my list of current favourites.

1. Brokers with their hands on their faces. The first and possibly still the best.
2. The dramatic falling red line on a graph. It’s like the classic cartoon graph, which plunges off the edge of the chart, and never (well hardly ever) has scales or axes.
3. The knock on effect. The human interest story designed to explain economics’ multiplier effect: the local corner shop skimps on window cleaning, so the window cleaners have cut back, so the chammy leather business is struggling, and in no time at all we’re at 3 million unemployed by Christmas.
4. The unlikely winners. The little-known (but still beaten-to-death-in-popular-journalism) phenomenon of unlikely goods, usually discretionary luxuries, succeeding in the prevailing economic environment. Examples cited include pizza home delivery, condoms, dining in for a tenner, and even Karl Marx.
5. The unfortunate loser. Sometimes seen alongside number 4. This sometimes appears to be the publication’s revenge on things it’s never liked much, from smoothies to BMWs.
6. The credit crunch as Malthusian check to greed and selfishness. To achieve full cliche status needs to include the phrase ‘financial wizardry’.
7. The undeserving bankers. If they aren’t about to be sacked (see number 1), they will be drinking champagne at an ING-sponsored party on the proceeds of the tax-payers’ bail-out.
8. The worst….since the great depression. Or other periods of general purpose crisis, such as the Second World War, Roosevelt’s New Deal, rationing, the Blitz, etc. The Sun is the runaway leader here. Its “Backing British Business” campaign even uses the slogan “Your country needs you“.
9. The list (ahem). Usually money saving tips which can be constantly recycled from one story to another.
10. ‘The credit crunch’. The biggest cliche of the lot. Used as shorthand for everything, and shoe-horned wherever possible into every other Sunday supplement article e.g. ‘credit crunch chic’, ‘credit crunch lunch’. And now being seen in other company as well - as in “the oil crunch“.

Thanks to Josh Hunt and Joe Ballantyne for their contributions. The picture at the top of this post comes from Brokers With Hands On Their Faces, and there’s a lot more there.

Editor’s note: Walker Smith, who runs The Futures Company’s Yankelovich division in the United States, has sent a long post reflecting on the 40-year context of Barack Obama’s Presidential victory this week. The conventional wisdom is that blog posts should be short and pithy. But we think that from time to time it’s better to give an argument the space and time it needs to unfold. Walker’s short essay is one of those occasions.

Walker Smith writes:

Barack Obama’s victory on Tuesday night was not unexpected. Three weeks out, political pundits knew that Obama had a lead that has never been overcome in modern political history. (Horse race political junkies will enjoy my favorite campaign resource, www.fivethirtyeight.com.) The real drama came an hour later when Obama took the stage with his family to honor this historic moment in his moving victory speech.

Chicago’s Grant Park, the scene of the victory rally, is a beautiful, expansive park bordering Lake Michigan that to this day still stirs up grueling memories for Baby Boomers like me, of the police violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The question that hangs over Barack Obama’s election is whether it really does represents the end of a 40-year cycle of deep political and cultural division, even though his electoral victory was built on effective party-political organisation rather than cutting across party-political lines.

In 1968, demonstrators set up their staging ground in Grant Park during the Democratic Convention for protests against the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policies. With characteristic irony, Yippie leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin dubbed it A Festival of Life.; instead it became a series of violent confrontations between protestors and police that reached a climax the night that Hubert Humphrey won the nomination with a nationally televised 17-minute frenzy of police brutality in front of the Hilton Hotel. Throughout the violence, protestors chanted “the whole world is watching” to the police, and, indeed, later that night, as Connecticut Senator Abraham Rubicoff put George McGovern’s name into nomination at the convention, he famously denounced the “Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.” His view was subsequently confirmed by the Walker Commission convened to investigate what happened. In its findings, the Commission called it police riot.

Now, four decades later, Obama was preparing to celebrate victory in the very place that, to many of us, was Ground Zero for the culture wars that have defined our lives and our politics ever since. This serendipitous symbolism was not lost on any of us - Democrats all - gathered around the TV. Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope that it was time to move beyond the Baby Boomer “psychodrama” born of “old grudges and revenge plots hatched” in the 1960s. Obama wrote that he yearned for those things that “bring us together as Americans.” And here he was Tuesday night, bringing us full circle, ready at last to close that chapter of American history.

As they are today, in 1968 Americans were scared, fearful and uncertain. It is a year that is generally regarded as a pivotal year in American history, as 2008 will surely also come to be regarded. No financial crisis engulfed the nation then, although, unrecognized at the time, the stock market was in the early years of a long bear market that would not end until 1982. Instead, 1968 bore witness to a rending conflict of politics and culture that erupted almost weekly into violence, including the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. These events bred the dread and apprehension that ushered in Richard Nixon as President, kindling an era of conservative Republican leadership at the helm of government that would be interrupted only twice, and with little impact, until Obama’s electoral landslide Tuesday night.

In his speech, Obama echoed the past as he looked to the future. He quoted Lincoln and he made recognizable allusions to ideas and speeches of both FDR and JFK. But he also made explicit rhetorical use of phrasings and imagery from two well-known speeches of Dr. King.

When Obama spoke of that night people being able “to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day,” he was borrowing from Dr. King’s 1965 speech from the steps of the Capitol Building in Montgomery, Alabama at the end of the march that began with highly publicized violence in Selma. King said that day that the wait for prejudice to end would not be long because “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In echoing King, Obama, too, was inspiring us to stay committed as we work together for a better nation and a better world.

Similarly, Obama borrowed from an even more uplifting phrase of Dr. King’s when he told us that even though “the road ahead will be long” and “our climb…steep,” he was sure that “we as a people will get there.” These remarks echo very closely the closing lines of the last speech Dr. King gave before he was killed. “I want you to know tonight,” King said, “that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.” In Obama’s speech on Tuesday night, there was perhaps no clearer statement of his belief that Americans can rise to the challenges before us and overcome them as a nation, and maybe even as part of the world community.

Obama takes office at a crossroads in American history. Cultural and political observer and New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote of this on Election Day. Brookes argued that there is a confluence of three eras now coming to an end – the end of the long economic boom that began in the 1980s, the end of conservative dominance in recent American politics and the end of Baby Boomer supremacy in American society.

While there are many problems to be fixed, Brooks foresees the emergence of a new America. America is free to reinvent itself, because, suddenly, the country is unfettered by the forces that have determined the direction of the country for the past few decades. Barack Obama, he believes, is the man for the moment.

This is the kind of promise that has always animated Americans. Yet, there is a dread that weighs upon the American spirit these days. It is seen in the utter collapse of confidence and self-assurance as measured by every poll conducted over the last three months. It is seen in the yearning for leadership and integrity expressed by so many as they left the voting booths on Tuesday. It was in evidence Tuesday night as millions of Americans literally danced in the streets in dozens of cities after Obama’s victory. It was the reason for the crash in retail sales reported on Thursday. Americans are spooked and as a result they have retrenched. Before any new era can be opened, the American verve must be recharged.

This is a tall order for Obama. He invited us Tuesday night to share that vision with him, and for that moment we did. There were no dry eyes in our group that night. Even my Republican friends, to a person, have said that they, too, had a lump in their throats. But Obama’s job is going to be tough.

For one thing, Obama’s victory was not achieved by cutting across party lines. Journalist Bill Bishop has studied and written extensively about the yawning partisan divide in American society. (We’ve blogged here before about his book, The Big Sort.) In his initial analyses of the county-by-county voting patterns across the country, he finds that Obama did in 2008 what Bush did in 2004. Each built margins of victory in their respective strongholds – blue counties for Obama and red counties for Bush – that were large enough to overcome their deficits elsewhere. It’s true that in red counties Obama closed the size of the losing gap that Kerry had in 2004, but Obama won by winning the blue counties by huge margins. Only the rare red county in 2004 actually turned blue in 2008. In short, despite Obama’s unifying rhetoric, his success was created in a highly partisan way.

In fact, America has not made a 180-degree ideological turn. Instead, Americans are just plain worried about the economy, and the state of the economy determines Presidential election outcomes. Ray Fair is a Yale economist who has shown that in Presidential elections the change in the incumbent party can be predicted from the economy alone (using inflation and two measures of GDP: his 2008 assessment is on his website). No surprise, then, that James Carville hung that famous sign in Clinton headquarters during the 1992 campaign – “It’s the economy, stupid.” The economy elected Obama. If this election had been about national security, McCain would likely have won in an electoral landslide.

The wounds of 1968 have not healed yet, and the fears of 2008 loom large. But Barack Obama brings a different temperament to the Presidency. He believes in possibilities because he himself is living proof of the power of those possibilities. He gives other hope and faith in those possibilities when he echoes the inspiring words of American icons; heroes, really. If America is to emerge as a different place, it will not be because America has become something different already. It will be because Barack Obama has the audacity it takes to rally the nation in a unifying way behind a hopeful, confident vision of possibilities. He has begun this already. So far, it’s working. As my friends and I said to each other as we went our separate ways Tuesday night, we must keep faith with what Obama reminds us is our quintessentially American strength, the belief that, yes, we can.

The photograph at the top of this post is from the Boston Globe’s campaign blog, Political Intelligence.

Tom Ding writes:

When I discovered last week that my brand new phone gives me unlimited Google Maps on-the-go, I had one of those ‘The Future Has Arrived’ moments, able to locate the nearest pubs and bus stops at a glance. Which got me to thinking about the different functions of a map, and how cleverly Google has partitioned them. You see, Google Maps is useful indeed: It can be a Sat Nav in your pocket or a route-finder on your PC and it has an interface perfectly suited for such quick tasks.

Perhaps though, we should regard it as the latest evolution of the 1920s ‘wrist-mounted, wind-up Sat-Nav’ shown in the picture at the top of this post. Google Maps gives you no context. It is great, so long as you know exactly where you want to go to. It is a road map, not an atlas, and definitely not a globe.

And this is where Google Earth comes in. Here, exactly the same data has been used for something completely different, and this time it is all about looking, rather than finding. Instead of the watch, I think of Google Earth as being a modern equivalent of the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican- somewhere that you go when you cannot see a place first-hand, somewhere that you could easily lose a few hours and somewhere that not enough people know about.

And Google Earth is getting better. We are now all free, in a Wikipedia-esque spirit of collaboration, to hack the program, at least a little bit, and create our own ‘layers’ dedicated to whatever topic we choose. Just this week, someone has published a layer called “Crisis in Darfur“. There is a layer of “Lighthouses in New Zealand” and another of Frank Gehry buildings. With all of this within a couple of clicks reach, I can’t help but feel like Google is biding their time here- waiting for their user-generated library to reach a critical mass before they tell the world about it.

By then, it will not just be an old fashioned globe, but an encyclopedia inside a globe. We will be able to visually explore almost any subject by geography, by topic and by time. And then, well, then the future really will have arrived.

Andrew Curry writes:

Another organisation which has changed its name recently is the National Consumer Council, which became Consumer Focus on 1st November - not just a piece of rebranding, since it took on new responsibilities at the same time.

As part of the planning for the handover, we ran a futures project with the NCC on how consumer advocacy would look in 2020. The report was published by the NCC shortly before the handover.

The analysis and the process are laid out in the report. The work identified four significant challenges for 2020 - some adaptive, some emerging:

• Engaging the less-engaged: How can consumer policy advocacy organisations continue to engage and maintain their dialogue with an increasingly diverse and fragmented population?

• Supporting empowerment: How to provide consumers with the skills and confidence to promote and protect their interests, to ensure that they get a fair deal, and that they have access to the right communication channels to make their voices heard.

• Managing consumption in a resource-stretched world: How will consumer behaviour and advocacy change in a world in which consumption is more constrained?

• Global relations for the benefit of consumers and producers: How to operate at a sufficiently global level to give consumers power over global and international matters which affect their interests.

The report’s not currently available from the NCC site, one of those technicalities to do with reassigning NCC legacy pages to the new organisation’s web site. For the moment, therefore, you can download it via the link below.

And a word about the picture at the top of the page; it’s by Ian Mcdermott, an illustrator who sat in on the futures workshop abd sketched his impressions of the discussions going on around him. The work he produced on the day illustrates the report - a series of visual metaphors, if you like.

You can download the report here:

ncc2020_viewofconsumerfutures

Emily Pitts writes:

The late work of Mark Rothko is currently on show at the Tate Modern, and much has been written about the innate spirituality of both the artist and the work. Rothko was one of the last of the Modernist artists, a contemporary of Jackson Pollock and de Kooning, and many of his ideas and painterly practices looked back rather than forwards. As the critic Robert Hughes observed, he believed that his ‘painting could carry the load of major meanings and possess the same comprehensive seriousness as the art of fresco in the 16th century or the novel in 19th century Russia”.

Rothko at his best should allow us to contemplate, as the shadows of the colour open and close before us with luminosity and movement. Indeed, the artist was very careful in stipulating how his work was shown, hung, and lit because of the importance to him of its impact on the viewer. To experience his low-lit, enveloping canvases is often described as similar to stepping into a cathedral, and reviews and critiques tend to be peppered with religious language.

But visiting the exhibition, one of the striking features is the lack of reverence to be found among the visitors. This is not to say that the work on display is not spiritual, or fails to convey a sense of the sublime. Instead, it is the all but inevitable result of the business of blockbuster art shows. Earlier this month, an article in Marketing Week (not available online without subscription) argued that marketing had ruined art. At the Rothko exhibition the visitor is accosted by the usual array of extras – headsets, printed guides, the line of merchandise on the way out. Because of the large volume of visitors, entry is operated on a timed basis. So perhaps it’s not surprising that visitors are wont to race round, listening to commentary rather than looking at the work, and picking up some postcards at the end. The marketing and packaging of the show doesn’t help the work find its audiences. Instead, visitors seem confused as to how to approach it. There is relatively little of the usual reaction of thought and quiet reflection that are normally associated with Rothko.

This all begs the question of the role of marketing in art; can marketing devalue the work it attempts to promote? If culture becomes just one more way to consume, does art become as disposable as consumer goods? Germaine Greer was quoted in Marketing Week as saying that ‘the art form of the 21st century is marketing’. This may be true, or may be grandstanding (although her example of Damien Hirst creating such a strong brand on a ‘conspicuously threadbare rationale’ resonates) – but when marketing overtakes the art in question, the works seem to become secondary to the gloss of marketing, and the cachet of an exhibition lies in visiting it rather than absorbing it, perhaps marketers have to ask themselves what it is they’re trying to achieve by marketing.

The picture at the top of this post is from The Swelle Life - which has an entertaining post about the Tate’s merchandising of Rothko. (They’re not fans). The Tate Modern exhibition runs until 1st February 2009.

© Jake Goretzki