Culture

The Vibe Shift: How a Return to Family Values and Meritocracy is Reshaping Society and Consumer Behavior

The Vibe Shift, a term coined by historian Niall Ferguson, refers to a cultural and ideological pivot in societal values, often marked by a departure from previously dominant narratives and the emergence of new paradigms. The 2025 Vibe Shift is a cultural and societal transformation that marks a return to traditional family values and a renewed emphasis on merit over identity-based narratives. This shift is a realignment of societal priorities that is already influencing politics, culture, and consumer behavior in the United States—and is poised to ripple across the globe.

Understanding the Vibe Shift

The Vibe Shift represents a reaction to the hyper-individualism and identity politics that have dominated Western societies in the recent decade. Ferguson argues that the pendulum is swinging back toward a more grounded, reality-based worldview. This includes:

Family Values: A renewed appreciation for the family as the foundational unit of society, emphasizing stability, intergenerational support, and community cohesion.
Meritocracy: A shift away from race- and gender-based quotas or preferences in favor of systems that reward individual achievement, skill, and effort.
Biological Realities: A growing acknowledgment of the scientific fact that there are only two biological sexes, male and female.

These principles are not merely abstract ideas; they are shaping the way people live, work, and consume.

The Vibe Shift in Society and Politics

United States

In the U.S., the Vibe Shift is evident in the growing backlash against progressive policies that prioritize identity over merit. For example, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn affirmative action in college admissions reflects a broader cultural shift toward merit-based systems. Similarly, the push for parental rights in education—such as the movement against gender ideology in schools—highlights the resurgence of family values as a political force.

The Vibe Shift is also reflected in the growing popularity of commentators like Jordan Peterson, who emphasize personal responsibility, traditional values, and biological realities.

Europe

In Europe, the Vibe Shift is for now visible in the rise of conservative and populist movements that prioritize national identity, family, and meritocracy. In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has championed family values and pushed back against progressive gender ideology. These movements reflect a broader European trend toward cultural conservatism and a rejection of the negative effects of identity politics.

Asia

In Asia, the Vibe Shift aligns with longstanding cultural values that emphasize family, education, and merit. Countries like Japan and South Korea have long prioritized family cohesion and academic achievement, and these values are now being reinforced in the face of declining birthrates and economic challenges. In China, the government’s emphasis on traditional Confucian values and its crackdown on what it sees as “Western decadence” (such as gender ideology) reflect a similar cultural realignment.

How the Vibe Shift is Changing Consumer Behavior

The Vibe Shift is not just a political or cultural phenomenon; it is also reshaping consumer behavior in profound ways. Here are some key trends to watch:

1. Family-Oriented Products and Services

As family values regain prominence, there will be increased demand for products and services that cater to family life. This includes everything from larger homes and family-friendly vehicles to educational tools and family-oriented entertainment. Companies that can tap into this trend—such as those offering homeschooling resources or multi-generational travel packages—will thrive.

2. Value instead of Virtue

The Vibe Shift’s emphasis on reality and merit will lead to a preference for authentic, high-quality products over those marketed primarily on the basis of identity or virtue signaling. Consumers will increasingly value quality, durability, and functionality. Brands that focus on these attributes will gain market share.

3. Health and Wellness

The recognition of biological realities will drive demand for health and wellness products that align with natural human physiology. This includes fitness programs, nutritional supplements, and medical services that respect biological sex differences. The growing popularity of biohacking and personalized medicine reflects this trend.

4. Education and Skill Development

As meritocracy gains traction, there will be a surge in demand for education and training programs that help individuals develop marketable skills. Online learning platforms, vocational training, and certification programs will see increased enrollment as people seek to improve their prospects in a competitive, merit-based economy.

5. Cultural Production

Entertainment and media that reflect traditional values and biological realities will resonate with audiences. Films, books, and music that celebrate family, heroism, and individual achievement will gain popularity, while content that promotes identity politics or undermines traditional values will be less in demand.

Future Impact

The rejection of gender and identity politics in large parts of the world with a rapidly growing global economic impact, including China, SE Asia, and India, suggests that the Vibe Shift is part of a broader global trend.

While the Vibe Shift has the potential to address grave challenges—such as declining birthrates, social fragmentation, and economic stagnation— it is not clear what will happen to ecological preservation and minority groups.

The politicization of these issues has not benefitted them. As the preservation of our planet’s nature has become a matter of ideology, it is now not any more common sense to care for our natural environment, but a matter of political positioning. Similarly, a developed society should accept its minority groups as valuable menbers, but politicized DEI programs have led to a pushback. DEI policies are not effecting the fairness they promise.It eliminates candidates with merit from highly sought-after opportunities while elevating and at the same time demeaning the candidates DEI is supposed to be helping by telling them, “You got this job because you’re a minority.”

A society structured according to race, gender, and political affiliation instead of individual achievement is politically skewed. A humanist society is color- and gender- blind, seeing every human, regardless of skin color and gender, as individual with dignity and unique talents. Unfortunately, we are still far away from a world where individuals can thrive and contribute to society without having to submit to overarching power systems.

The pendulum of societal trends is swinging the other way now – powers change, but only time will tell if this pendulum will ever find a center of gravity. It will not be easy to get to a balanced view. A society that repeats its past mistakes and does not understand its present will be unable to shape its own future.

January 21, 2025

The Vessel, New York

The buildings of New York always held a special symbolic quality. The Empire State Building was iconic for it’s age, representing a relentless striving upwards, culminating in it’s gleaming Art Deco top.

The Word Trade Center was a symbol of post-war New York. Jean Baudrillard uncovered its symbolism:

“Why are there two towers at New York’s World Trade Center? All of Manhattan’s great buildings were always happy enough to confront each other in a competitive verticality, the result of which is an architectural panorama in the image of the capitalist system: as pyramidal jungle, all of the buildings attacking each other. …This architectural symbolism is that of the monopoly; the two WTC towers, perfect parallel, a quarter-mile high on a square base, perfectly balanced and blind communicating vessels. The fact that there are two of them signifies the end of all competition, the end of all original reference. … For the sign to be pure, it has to duplicate itself: it is the duplication of the sign that destroys its meaning. This is what Andy Warhol demonstrates also: the multiple replicas of Marilyn’s face are there to show at the same time the death of the original and the end of representation. …There is a particular fascination in this reduplication. As high as they are, higher than all the others, the two towers signify nevertheless the end of verticality. They ignore the other buildings, they are not of the same race, they no longer challenge them, nor compare themselves to them, they look one into the other as into a mirror… What they project is the idea of the model that they are one for the other… At the same time as the rhetoric of verticality, the rhetoric of the mirror has disappeared…”
Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, 1983

After reading Baudrillard’s text, one can understand the cynical context of the tragedy of 9/11: Intent on destroying a symbol of Western capitalism, these terrorists actually destroyed its premier symbol of hope, of being able to overcome singularity. And singularity is indeed back since 9/11, with monopolies since then having assumed increasing power.

Thomas Heatherwick’s New York Vessel has nothing of the aspirational qualities of the Empire State Building or the Word Trade Center, but it is the symbol of contemporary New York.

Heatherwick’s Vessel is repeatedly in the news because it attracts people to commit suicide by jumping from it. The fault, it is said, is that the railings are not high enough, and the operators and Heatherwick appear to have ignored calls to remedy the situation. Instead, the operators changed the entry fee from free to 10 dollars.

The railings, however, are not the only problem. People who want to commit suicide don’t do it just anywhere if only railings are low. The Golden Gate Bridge, for instance, is a rather popular suicide spot, and not accidentally it is also a symbolic structure, connecting two shores across a grand stretch of water with grand arches. Jumping from it to death then has something to do with a desperately wanted, but denied connection, perhaps unrequited love.

The Vessel is more insidious in its meaning. It is nothing to live in and nothing to cross over to get somewhere else. It is an interwoven circular staircase leading to nowhere but itself: It is a 3-dimensional hamster wheel, a Kafka’s Castle in glass and concrete.

This is a public structure, yet it is so anti-social that it borders on the absurd. By virtue of its steep staircases, it is unaccessible for people with disabilities or anyone over 65. This could be a place to unwind and meet, but there is no single tree and no single bench. By design, this structure excludes the vulnerable and the old, disallows any sitting or resting, and discourages any activity except climbing stairs.

Which is not fun either. In general, stairs exist for a functional reason, to get up or down in order to arrive somewhere. They are promising a goal at the end. Even in the sterile metaverses of computer games, there are awards once a player has completed a level. But here, stairs only lead to more stairs, and once you have arrived at the top, there is nothing to be found.

There is no seating after having climbed these 16 tedious floors, no water fountain, no hot dog stand, no greenery. There is no grand view to reward you either: views are obstructed by all the generic glass-clad facades around, a partial view of the Hudson river is the best you can get. Whatever you try, however often you go around and up and down these stairs, there is nothing to explore. The Vessel only leads back to itself, it is a panopticon of nihilism.

Cynically enough, the only other thing but climbing stairs you can do here is to commit suicide. It ends what this menacing structure represents: to run around in a hamster wheel of life designed to give you no joy.

New York once was the very place for human aspiration, a place where, at least in theory, if you just had enough determination and put in enough effort, you could become what you wanted, no matter where you came from. That was the great draw of New York, it’s promise and fascination.

But the new symbol of New York is the Vessel. This symbol wants not only to be looked at, it wants to be climbed so that it’s message is felt as pain in the calves and inscribed into your body: no matter how much you strive upwards, there is nothing here for you – unless, of course, you belong to the one percent looking down at this spectacle from their supertall buildings.

There are countless vacated shops now in downtown Manhattan, all former small businesses which got crushed between the pandemic and ever-increasing rental prices. This depressing ground level is encircled and looked down at from an ever-increasing number of outrageously tall and thin buildings built exclusively for the super-rich.

Monuments tend to reveal the mindsets of the people who commission them. The stifling, pseudo-classical architecture of the Nazis was meant to make the poisonous, petit-bourgeois thinking at its core look grandiose. The monuments of former communism projected phony ideas of a proletarian super-humanity while real people starved.

The Vessel is a panoptic hamster wheel for humans. In the Middle Ages, only the land owning elite had a good life, the vulnerable were excluded, and serfs had to labor on the edge of survival. Human work was degrading, only land ownership, reserved for a tiny elite, guaranteed the power to use others and make profit. The Vessel, as excluding and anti-social as it is, is the symbol of the rent-seeking class, projecting the image of a postmodern feudal order. This is the vessel of the new vassals.

For Jean Baudrillard, Manhattan represented the very image of the capitalist system. It’s not a pretty image anymore.

August 2, 2021

Bubbles

2020, the year of the pandemic, brought with it new popular words and phrases. “New normal”, “social distancing” and “flatten the curve” stand out, but also “travel bubble”.

These new pop phrases have something interesting in common: they combine two semantic opposites in one phrase. “New” is about something we don’t know yet, the opposite of “normal”, something we know and are used to. “Social” is about getting together, the opposite of “distancing”. A curve is curved, the opposite of straight and “flat”. And “travel” is about free movement, while the inside of a “bubble” is a confined space. This results in a semantic reversal where normal is not normal, social is not social, and travel is not free movement. Language reflects its time, and so do artifacts.

A bubble can be a concept, but also an artifact. As part of “The Elements in Design”, I looked into the history of bubbles in art, design and science. In the nineteen-sixties, bubbles weren’t seen as symbol of confinement. Instead, they promised escape, lightness and ephemerality, flexibility instead of rigidity, and spontaneousness instead of fixed rules.

A Short History of Bubbles

Francesco del Monte, born in Venice into the noble Tuscan family Bourbon del Monte, was a remarkable personality: amateur alchemist, cardinal of the Roman Catholic church, glass collector and unofficial intermediator for the affairs of the Medici in Rome.

He was a great patron of the arts and sciences, and among the many talents he supported were two very remarkable ones: Galileo Galilei and Caravaggio. Francesco del Monte had a beautiful garden villa at Porta Pinciana in Rome, and there he had a small, vaulted alchemy workshop for which, sometimes between 1597 and 1600, he commissioned young Caravaggio to paint a ceiling mural.

Caravaggio, extravagant and highly gifted, depicted the gods Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto in an extreme foreshortened perspective, and he placed a translucent bubble in the center: a celestial sphere in which the sun, representing fire, revolves around the earth. In the symbolism of the alchemists, Jupiter stood for air, Neptune for water, and Pluto for earth.

Not only the perspective, also the depiction of the bubble’s intricate light refractions has not been seen before – Caravaggio must have consulted the scientists in del Monte’s salon, Galileo Galilei and possibly Giovanni Battista della Porta, to achieve his stunning result.

The Cardinal’s garden villa, later called Casino Aurora, became a fixture on the Grand Tour in the 18th century and was visited by personalities such as Goethe, Stendhal, Gogol and Henry James.

However, they did not see Caravaggio’s mural: it was painted over and rediscovered only in 1969. Francesco del Monte’s other famous beneficiary, Galileo Galilei, went on to discover that air is not, as it was assumed until then, weightless, but has a weight (he defined it as 1/660 the weight of water). To come to this conclusion, he used a bubble filled with air, made from a pig’s bladder. He also found that Copernicus was right and the earth revolves around the sun – to the dismay of the church and at the cost of his freedom and career.

Del Monte had a gift for picking extraordinary talent, but he could not protect Galileo, his greatest protégé, from his powerful contemporaries’ self-centered worldview. For them, it was themselves who are sitting in the very center of the universe. The Inquisition forced him to recant, and he was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

Caravaggio’s depiction was the result of his talks with Galileo when they met in villa Aurora. The celestial bubble, the focal point of Caravaggio’s mural, represented the universe. Today, over 400 years later, this idea of a scientist and an artist is stronger than ever. Physicists today think of the universe as a bubble; it just contains a lot more more than one earth and one sun – where it is observable, the universe holds 400 billion billion suns and many more planets.

In 1720, Bartholomew Gusmao allegedly built a flying machine propelled by hot air and flew it himself in Lisbon in front of the Portuguese royals. In 1783, the brothers Montgolfier constructed a balloon made from sackcloth and paper, held together by cord. They attached a basket with a sheep, a duck and a rooster and demonstrated its flight to King Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette at Versailles palace. The bubble was flying now.

It was again in the sixties of the twentieth century that capturing air became fashionable. In tune with the free-spirited theme of the times, bubbles inspired designers of a whole generation. In 1966, Andy Warhol showed his ‘Silver Clouds’ – helium-filled mylar cushions – at Leo Castelli’s gallery in New York.

Inflatable chair *“Blow”*, Jonathan De Pas, Donato D’Urbino, Paolo Lomazzi and Carla Scolari for Zanotta, 1967

In 1967, Italian furniture maker Zanotta introduced ‘Blow’, the first mass-produced inflatable chair for indoor use, designed by Jonathan De Pas, Donato D’Urbino, Paolo Lomazzi and Carla Scolari.

British architecture group Archigram proposed projects such as ‘Air Hab’ and ‘Inflatable Suit House’. In one of Archigram’s publications, Archigram 4, Warren Chalk writes about inspirations from “space comics, mobile computer brains and flexing tentacles”.

Haus-Rucker Co., “*Gelbes Herz (Yellow Heart)*“, 1968

Austria’s Haus-Rucker Co. presented ‘Yellow Heart’, an air-filled PVC structure on a steel frame which inflated and deflated to suggest a heartbeat.

*U.S. Pavilion for the World Expo Osaka 1970*, Interior sketch, by Davis, Brody, Chermayeff, Geismar, deHarak Associates

The world exhibition 70 in Osaka featured a variety of inflated exhibition halls. The US Pavillion was the largest free-span inflatable dome of its time.

Patrick McGoohan as Number Six, followed by autonomous balloon *Rover* in *The Prisoner*, 1968

Balloons also found their way into television series: In ‘The Prisoner’, an iconic British Science Fiction series filmed between 1967 and 1968, the main protagonist finds himself captured in ‘The Village’. When he attempts to escape, he is followed and captured by an large white balloon called Rover, an autonomous, intelligent object.

Inflatables symbolized the spirit of the times, carrying with them the idea of generation 68. Balloon designs promised escape, lightness and ephemerality. They offered flexibility instead of rigidity and spontaneousness instead of fixed rules.

In the late sixties and early seventies, balloon structures seemed to be the future of architecture. It was a future which did not happen. Except in some sports halls, ballon architecture did not take on; for everyday tear and wear, balloon structures proved to be too vulnerable.

Designers, artists and engineers are still fascinated by bubbles. The eMotion spheres by German firm Festo combine science fiction ideas of the sixties with technology from the 2010s. Designed to show the possibilities of autonomous guidance and monitoring systems, these autonomous flying balloons are equipped with eight small adaptive propellers and infrared LEDs. The balloons, controlled by a central computer, move out of the way of other flying objects, adapt to varying atmospherical conditions to maintain their formation, and charge themselves independently.

December 6, 2020

Home, sweet home

This is the first time most consumers across the world have the experience of being confined to their own home. What will this new experience mean for business? Let us look at the experiences of consumers during lockdowns and how this could impact consumption after Corona.

Phase 1: Panic
In the first phase of a quarantine, people struggle to understand the new situation. With the outlook to be confined to their homes and confronted with alarmist media messages, fear and anxiety drive people to expect the worst, and panic shopping for food sets in.

Phase 2: Getting to grips
In the second phase, people start to accomodate themselves with the new situation. With restaurants closed, many find that they are unskilled in the art of cooking and look for ways to use their stockpiles of food. Youtube creators quickly picked up on this new demand and are delivering videos with easy cooking instructions for panic-bought ingredients, for instance Corona Kochen by ZDF (Germany), Easy recipes (UK) or Easy treats (Australia). Next to cooking at home, wellness is booming.

Phase 3: Introspection
In the third phase, people get used to spend most of their time at home and start contemplating what to do with their time and circumstances. They consume more online media or try out new hobbies. Many find that while they have been busy living their lives, they neglected the homes they now find themselves in, and plan to enhance or refurbish their homes, if only to find themselves in better living conditions in case another lockdown might set in.

Phase 4: A new life
In the fourth phase, lockdowns are gradually being removed, and people get out of their homes again. Currently, European governments are planning to gradually reopen business. Austria, Denmark and the Czech Republic are reopening shops from mid-April, Norway and Lithuania from end of April, Sweden and Korea had no lockdowns. In China, where the lockdown has already ended, consumers had a phase of revenge shopping, flocking back to department stores to reward themselves after confinement and buying personal goods – luxury cosmetics, fashion accessories – to celebrate their newfound freedom and make themselves feel better.

Digital service providers are on the upswing: Adobe shares gained, penccil.com subscriptions are rising. On the other hand, airline and cruise line shares have dipped. But the quick reactions of investors and the longer term expectations of consumers are not always aligned: Saga cruise bookings for 2021, for instance, are up. A survey among consumers in Austria – the first country in Europe to gradually ease the lockdown – resulted in the intent of consumers to catch up on shopping, restaurant visits and travel. The survey shows that people also consider to change their lifestyle. These 4 trends will influence consumption in the future:

Off grid, on line
During the time of confinement, more consumers discovered the value of online services. This will accelerate the general shift from brick-and-mortar to online. More will work from home, and the online experience is evolving with virtual experiences, video storytelling and virtual assistants such as Samsung’s NEON project.

Home, sweet home
For many, home was mainly a place to sleep after a day spent outside – in transit, at the workplace, in restaurants. Being confined to their own homes was an experience most had for the first time in their lifetime. It was the only way to be safe and protected – an existential rather than just a circumstantial reason. Consumers found that their home is more important than they realized, and will look for ways to improve them.

Out but healthy
Consumers will stay vigilant about hygiene. Physical environments (hotels, retail spaces) emphasizing physical and mental health will benefit. Generous space is an advantage, while businesses connected to crowded spaces and crowded activities (budget hotels, football games…) have more to lose. Low-end hotel chain OYO, for example, has seen a 60% drop in revenue. High-end hotels should be better positioned from the outset and will think of new ways to advertise their top standards and promote offerings for private wellness, relaxation and meditation.

Bluer skies
As transport halts around the world, air pollution decreases and contrails diappear from the skies. People see skies which have not have been that blue since dozens of years, and in some places wild animals come back to explore quarantined towns. Videos of animals exploring quarantined towns get millions of views. This experience makes people reappreciate nature and in the long run more conscious about the environmental impact of their consumption. Public awareness about ecology is rising, questioning established industry structures and shopping patterns. The French president’s representative group of citizens recently proposed the closure of out-of-town hypermarkets to encourage shopping locally and shelving the 5G network because it uses 30 per cent more electricity than previous iterations. On the long run, consumers will increasingly look for products which are more responsive towards environment and society, with more authenticity baked in. Conscious consumption will be on the upswing, and products fit for this new view will have rich stories to tell about their integrity and value.

Focus on the internal image
To understand consumer trends, we have to understand the logic of consumer sentiment. As soon as shops reopened in Austria, long lines formed in front of home improvement stores, while there was initially less traffic in other shops. This indicates that consumption centering on the internal image – private space, homes – is benefiting, while consumption driven by the external image – fashion – will recover once social distancing rules have ended. Home improvement and interiors profit, while the established fashion industry is about to hibernate for a while. A Prada dress or a Louis Vuitton bag is bought to improve your external image: you want to look good and impress others. The importance of this external image diminishes when social exposure is reduced and social activites are curtailed. With rules on social distancing, the promise of fashion to signal and attract makes less sense. A new piece of furniture, on the other hand, is bought to improve your internal image.

Mayday (Post Scriptum, May 2nd, 2020)

Customers in front of Ikea on May 2nd, SCS Shopping City in the outskirts of Vienna

April 6, 2020

A new look at “Ornament and Crime”

Adolf Loos’ “Ornament and Crime” is still regarded by some as an important manifesto of modernist architecture. But it has been strangely overlooked that it was also a manifesto for a dangerous notion of “cultural superiority”.

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March 19, 2019

Digital fashion

Three ideas for digital fashion:

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January 28, 2018

Principles of Design

Four collections of Design Principles: “It is right that we should stand by and act on our principles; but not right to hold them in obstinate blindness, or retain them when proved to be erroneous.”
Michael Faraday

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December 20, 2017

The 5 C’s: Design skills for the near future

CODE

Since the first introduction of CAD and 3d modeling systems, code is behind most products. With generative design, the code becomes the design itself. Big data about user behaviour in combination with machine learning and adaptive production methods (Industry 4.0) will make highly personalized and adaptive design solutions the new normal. To master code, designers should be able to write it.

CONSTRUCTION

With the Internet of Things, the division between interaction design and industrial design is about to disappear. A designer should know how to code, prototype, and build intelligent products with embedded applications. Starting points are the Raspberry Pi, Arduino or Nanode.

COMPLEXITY

Global economic, technological, social and environmental issues are getting increasingly intertwined. There are no simple solutions to complex problems. The ability to navigate complexity will be a key skill for the designer of the future.

CULTURE

In a globalized world, cultures can adapt, mix, or clash, and differences can be hard to handle. Deep-seated assumptions rooted in a designer’s own culture can lead to products which do not work in other cultures – psychologically or in terms of use. Openness, the ability to emphatize, and an understanding of different cultures and users will be as important as understanding economy and technology.

CYCLE

In a world of limited resources, knowledge of recycling technologies, biodegradable materials, and the ability to design for a circular economy – by considering disassembly and recycling already during the design process – becomes increasingly important. Designers should be able not only to conceive new products, but to plan the way these products are made, unmade, and recycled. What comes around goes around.

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This post was originally published in February 2014.

December 12, 2017

Design and Myth

In his 1957 book „Mythologies“, Roland Barthes analyses the Deesse (The nickname of the Citroen DS car, “goddess” in French) as a mythical object, and plastic as a mythical material. Plastic interests him because of its transformability, the metamorphoses it contains, being able to imitate everything. He finds it remarkable that plastics are given mythical names of Greek shepherds (Polystyrene, Polyvinyl) and writes: “The public waits in a long queue in order to witness the accomplishment of the magical operation par excellence: the transmutation of matter.”

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December 10, 2017

Envisioning communities

The vision

In 2008, HH Sheikha Moza bint Nasser wanted to explore designs for better communities in Qatar and the region: Diverse and responsible communities which would invite independent thinking and creativity. Mario Gagliardi, CEO at Qatar Foundation at the time, was tasked with providing proposals and consequently organised a workshop to explore innovative approaches to urban design which could inspire better building practices.

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November 28, 2017

Art, Design and the Elements

Aristotle explained the elements in terms of what we might call sensual qualities: hot, cold, wet and dry. His main thought was that all materials are manifestations of different compositions of the elements. This idea – that the world consists of underlying elements – was fundamental in several ways. It implies that the world is not what it outwardly seems: A stone is not just a stone – it is composed of a mixture of elements which we cannot see. If the world consists of underlying elements, then materials could be transformed by changing their underlying composition.

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November 14, 2017

Korea’s most successful luxury brand

Whoo (后), the cosmetics brand designed by Mario Gagliardi, is now Korea’s most successful luxury brand, selected by the Seoul Economic Daily in 2017 (read more about its creation). The brand exceeded 100 billion Korean Won in annual sales in 2009, 200 billion Won in 2013, 400 billion Won in 2014, 800 billion Won in 2015, and annual sales exceeded 1 trillion Won last year. Whoo’s parent company LG Household & Health Care, part of LG Group, expects the annual sales of Whoo to surge to 1.6 trillion Won (US$ 1,4 billion) in 2017, making it the best-performing Korean luxury brand in history.

Designed at a time when Western cosmetics brands dominated the Asian market with narratives of Paris and New York, the brand was revolutionary in being the first cosmetics series to focus instead on Asian culture and history.

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October 31, 2017

Conceptualizing brands: Metaphors of Brand Management

The management of brands is often biased by the way managers conceptualize and understand brands. We have identified four commonly employed metaphors of brands which, all in their own way, produce unwanted effects on the management and utilization of brands.

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April 27, 2016

Designer Jargon

The main communication tools for designers are drawings, sketches and models. The style of designer drawings and prototypes can be described as the “jargon” of designers – the drawing style can reflect the assumptions and desires of designers.

The use of jargon is significant for the degree of adaptation of people into an organisational culture; It binds specific groups together and creates a boundary of language to other groups. The style of designer drawings can be soft or aggressive, light or dark, reduced or full of patterns, geometric or dominated by artistic strokes; Different design departments and design consultancies mostly have their own style which contributes to their shared assumptions.

The essence of design drawings are – to an extent – understood across national cultures. However, the interpretation of their value and meaning is culture-specific and depending on individual designer’s knowledge, beliefs and paradigms.

A designer will see the concept or interesting features behind a the sketch of another designer, while a non-designer might have troubles deciphering the message in a design sketch.

Nigel Cross states that the use of sketches, drawings and other models constitutes a coherent and symbolic media system for thinking and communicating in design. Designers see the features and problems in a design and improve it in hermeneutic and dialectic “sketch discussions”, where one sketch is complementing another.

The result of this constant refining and reconsidering is finally presented to management in a “polished” form, a drawing or model which defines every detail of the design drawing. Designers with experience develop a “design eye” and see features of a design a non-designer would not see.

This is perhaps similar to scientists or other specialists who develop a common understanding of their field; They might not share worldviews and opinions, but they share a particular knowledge, which enables them to collaborate on a project despite being different personalities from different cultures and backgrounds.

Krippendorff describes that vocabulary creates “structure within textual matter that is based on selectively (re)cognizing similarities in the compositions or usages of artifacts: (re)combinable and (de)composable forms, components or assemblages, much like words, and syntactic structures”.

The understanding between designers is indeed relatively homogenous across firms and cultures. The change of a design can be discussed in a similar way with designers from Latvia, Germany, the United States or South Korea – the nessecary fore-understanding was established by education and experience.

The drawing or mock-up as the main communication tool is complemented by a visually orientated, spoken language which is used during the design process. The spoken language used between designers is mostly a result of other forms of visual representation. Depending on the discipline, it will involve colours (“this colour creates too much contrast, tone it down”), shapes (“the curve here should be smoother, this would also make it easier for tooling”), composition (“the detail here is too dominant, it would distract the attention of the user from the main button”) or, in media design, the choreography of actions (the movement here in front should be shorter and smoother to reduce loading time on the internet, while the element in the background should slowly disappear by reducing the hue”).

This language is predominantly visual, aesthetic, and often also simultaneously focused on the user (ergonomics, usability) or technical solutions. This “language of design” used in the design process is relatively universal. However, this does not apply to the assumptions behind the concept of a design object, which are depending on world-views and cultures.

The aesthetic value of colours, shapes and compositions are perceived differently in different cultures, a colour or shape one designer finds aesthetically pleasing will be perceived as uninteresting by another. This disparity is, on the one hand, enhanced between different regional cultures with different aesthetic preferences, and on the other hand equalized by “dominating designs”, i.e. designs which are supposed to be right, are conceived by role-models (famous designers) or are dispersed by a dominating culture.

March 2, 2016