Our Homes reveal the story of culture…. Do You Really Want a New Kitchen Counter?
A home plays two essential roles for many people: It’s the place you live your day-to-day life, and it’s the single most important asset you’ll ever have. Housing has served these dual purposes for much of the country’s history, but over the past 50 years in particular, as rising home values have far outpaced wage growth, Americans have begun to stake their financial future even more heavily on their home. If you’re one of the nearly two-thirds of adults in this country who own a home, it’s pretty likely that its potential sale price is a major factor in your long-term financial stability, even if you don’t plan to sell anytime soon.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/lifestyle-media-home-improvement-trends-obsession/672168/?utm_source=twitter&utm_term=2022-11-18T12%3A30%3A55&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_medium=social
Our homes reveal the story of culture…
Tencent wants you to pay with your palm. What could go wrong?
That’s where Tencent is stepping in. The new tech is undoubtedly appealing as the company competes with Alipay for dominance. And as China continues to grapple with ongoing zero-covid policies that mean people still wear masks and avoid physical contact, allowing people to pay by waving their hands up to a few inches from the camera seems preferable to facial or fingerprint recognition. So by offering users small cash incentives in exchange for their participation and data, Tencent is one step closer to spreading the use of palm-print recognition through everyday life—and on a truly massive scale.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/15/1063218/whats-next-biometrics-palm-print-recognition-tencent-we-chat-pay/
America May Not Be Ready for the Looming Tsunami of Deepfakes
Americans may not be ready for this tsunami wave of deepfakes. In our recent research, subjects struggled to distinguish between deepfakes and authentic videos. When we randomly assigned a set of deepfake and authentic videos to more than 2,000 individuals and asked them to pick the deepfake, our test subjects were wrong over one-third of the time. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the social media savviness of American youth, middle school students outperformed adults, including the educators who might be responsible for helping them learn key skills to avoid online misinformation. Even computer science students at a top U.S. engineering university were susceptible: They were unable to sort out deepfakes from authentic videos more than 20 percent of the time.
https://www.rand.org/blog/2022/11/america-may-not-be-ready-for-the-looming-tsunami.html?utm_campaign=&utm_content=1669147501&utm_medium=rand_social&utm_source=linkedin
Kyoto artisans grant old clothes new life with traditional black dye
Kurozome Rewear is an offshoot of Kyoto Montsuki, which has been working with textiles since 1915. The shop’s specialty is black montsuki, a traditional piece of Japanese formalwear. Using old techniques that include multiple rounds of dyeing cloth and letting it dry in the sun, Kyoto Montsuki’s artisans are able to create a deep black color that reflects as little light as possible.
https://www.trendwatching.com/innovation-of-the-day/kyoto-artisans-grant-old-clothes-new-life-with-traditional-black-dye?utm_campaign=iotd&utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_term=Kurozome%20Rewear&utm_content=Kurozome%20Rewear
50% of Luxury Brands Will Disappear By 2030. What Are The Key Risks?
First of all, what is luxury? A straightforward way to define the term is to think of luxury as the ability to create extreme value for an individual. Hence, no brand ever will be luxury to everyone, but it must have the ability to be of extreme value for some. To create value, which is so high that it becomes non-linear, a luxury brand needs to be fully centered around a specific need of the client. Hence, it’s never about the brand but all about the ability to have a specific role in the life of a client.
Years of extensive university research and numerous brand and category audits have shown that, fundamentally, brands that manage to achieve such a critical role gain a significant shift in how they are perceived. People who understand the signal of an extreme value-creating brand feel a significant perception shift in several key dimensions related to themselves.
https://jingdaily.com/luxury-brands-disappear-2030-key-risks/
The Mobile Museum
Why Office Buildings Are Still in Trouble
“We see lots of tenants not renewing their leases, going either fully remote, or renewing their leases but signing up for less space,” said Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, one of the authors of the paper, and a professor specializing in real estate at Columbia Business School. “It all adds up.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/17/business/office-buildings-real-estate-vacancy.html
Belgian organic supermarket chain sells mushrooms grown on its unsold bread
Brussels-based ECLO picks up bread from Bio-Planet stores and mixes it with sawdust to create a growing medium. That substrate is packed into bags and pasteurized, after which mycelium is added and mushrooms start growing. After four to twelve weeks, ECLO harvests organic eryngii and nameko mushrooms, which are then sold at all of Bio-Planet’s stores.
https://www.trendwatching.com/innovation-of-the-day/organic-supermarket-chain-sells-mushrooms-grown-on-its-unsold-bread?utm_campaign=iotd&utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_term=Bio-Planet%20%C3%97%20ECLO&utm_content=Bio-Planet%20%C3%97%20ECLO
Brutalist beauty
Grotesque art is a slippery category that can be traced back to ancient Roman paintings, which first merged the human form with animals. Throughout history, grotesquery has embodied the anti-beauty aesthetic that pushes conventional boundaries and showcases the allure of extreme transformations. More recently, drag artists have been pioneers of what’s become grotesque content online — it’s partly why The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula show is so popular — and, while it’s not being painted across elaborate ceilings today, the movement still lingers through pimple-popping videos and extreme beauty tutorials.
https://i-d.vice.com/en/article/g5v3bj/grotesque-social-media-trend
Analyzing Trends with Tim Stock 