Society

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

Design support for the 21st century

Published 2021 by Dongdaemun Design Plaza/ddp Design Fair/Seoul Design Foundation.

From hand-holding to startup financing

The history of design support until today has two distinct phases: project hand-holding and startup financing. From the nineteen-eighties until around the 2000’s, the economy revolved around industrial production, and a preferred model of design support was project hand-holding. In this model, a designer was brought together with a company for a project, and a part of the costs were financed. This worked well to raise awareness for design as a means to add value to companies. However, after the initial funding was completed, there was little follow-up, and the first project often remained the last.

⁠Around the 2000’s, the overall financialization of the economy led to a new model: to directly finance start-up teams through state investment agencies or investment aggregators. After the early years of excitement, it turned out that some freshly financed startup companies were unable to deliver their envisioned project. The incentive to get high amounts of funding, coupled with demands to become profitable in a very short timeframe, led several startups to exaggerate their claims. Some projects turned out to be mainly speculative, and problems in startup teams included lack of design competence, lack of product development experience, and difficulties with production and logistics.

⁠The hand-holding model suffered from a short-term focus and a lack of follow-up analysis, and short-term design jobs often suffer from a lack of engagement by designers. Also the startup model suffers from short-termism. In the startup model, companies are expected to quickly grow out of thin air: development, production, sales and logistics, all has to be built from scratch. The hand-holding model at least has the advantage that the wheel doesn’t have to be reinvented: the company is already existing and has capabilities, and bringing designers in should add value.

⁠In search of a new concept

⁠After the industrialization of the eighties and the financialization of the 2000’s, a new, more considered concept to support companies and advance growth is needed. New laws to reduce harmful ecological impact demand better resource utilization and options for recycling, and a new generation of consumers demands new standards of corporate transparency and resource traceability.

⁠SMEs thrive in specialized niches. There, design can help with creating innovative product and service concepts or with improving existing products, including ecological considerations and consumer trends.

⁠Which SMEs are successful, and why? Italian design producers such as Artemide, Alessi, or Zanotta are driven by passion and a long-term commitment to design. They provide meaning, pride and security for family members and employees, and they cooperate with a range of designers for their collections. Similarly, excelling medium sized German companies such as Festo or Durst base their strength in their commitment to innovation and technical excellence. None of these organizations exist to reap short-term profits: Instead, they have a long-term focus, cultivate innovation and are driven by an untiring motivation to excel.

⁠Design Collaboration

⁠Already In the nineteen-sixties, car companies entered collaborations with designers, either because they lacked sufficient design capability, or the in-house team needed design inspiration. Designer Giorgetto Giugiaro created cars for Ferrari, Maserati, Alfa Romeo and others, while Giovanni Bertone designed cars for Lamborghini, Citroën, Fiat, Volvo and others. Design cooperations are also a successful model in fashion design: recent cooperations include Virgil Abloh for Off-White or Jil Sander for Uniglo.

⁠Design Collaboration can be a highly effective support model for SMEs because it instantly adds design capacity and experience which would be time-consuming and costly to establish in-house. To make it work, a range of points have to be considered.

⁠To be suitable for Design Collaboration, projects should have a shared vision and long-term development focus, keeping in mind that a new design offering can fundamentally improve the market position of a company. Design Collaboration is built on the premise that designers and companies treat each other as partners. To make sure of a good match between a designer and a company, a design audit looking at capabilities and motivation should be conducted. To maintain lasting motivation, designers should share risk and reward of product development by being remunerated through a percentage of revenues.

⁠Design Collaboration is ideally supervised by a design promotion organization which acts as catalyst, principal supporter and consulting partner of companies and designers, helping with audit, analysis, and match-making.

⁠Creative professionals are mostly educated to compete, but complex tasks can only be mastered through collaboration.

Principles of design collaboration

Design Collaboration instantly adds the power of design to the capabilities of a company – transparently, fairly, and with a long-term focus. Here are 5 principles to ensure successful cooperations:

1: The Design Audit

Finding the right fit between a designer and a company is a step where often mistakes are made. Sometimes, a designer is simply taken because somebody in the company happens to know one. Other times, a design company is chosen on the grounds of being famous, but their work style and expertise might not fit to the company and design project at hand. Sure, these approaches might work by chance, but more often they don’t.

Every design project is different, so it is only partly helpful to deduce from a designer’s previous work how a future design will turn out. Instead, to find out if a designer is right for a project, conduct a design audit – see more about this below.

After the audit, have a conversation to find out about interests and passions. Then let the designer make a presentation about his vision for your project and company (this is not about the design itself or how it will look like – you don’t want ideas for free – but about the designer’s vision and approach). If the project at hand captures a designer’s heart and imagination, you will see it reflected in his presentation.

2: Collaboration from Brief to Launch

It often happens that companies do not know enough about design to use it to its full potential. Take the design brief, the start of each design development. In a conventional service relationship, the designer is given a brief by the client. For example, a company might tell a designer to design “something like” the product or brand of a competing company. But copying is not only unethical, it is also a strategic mistake – copies never help a company to achieve lasting success on the market. This brief is hence not in the best interest of the company, and it would need to be changed.

In a Design Collaboration, the design brief is created collaboratively between company and designer. The designer is not a mere receiver of orders: instead, he has to learn about the capabilities, needs and visions of a company to come up with concepts which work. The collaborative brief pins down a schedule, process and envisioned result. During the design process, key ideas and milestones are shared and discussed with key people in the company. Finally, the designer helps with suggestions for production, promotion and product launch.

3: Share Risk and Reward

Will a design be a success on the market? Every new endeavor comes with risk. In a traditional service relationship, the designer is used as a service provider, and he company bears all the risk for the design being successful on the market. In a design cooperation, on the other hand, risk and reward are shared.

The resulting design is offered on the marketplace mentioning both the company or brand name and the designers name, and the designer is mainly remunerated through a percentage of sales. That way, it is in the designer’s interest to do what he can to make the design successful on the market, and he will cooperate with production, marketing and sales to help with ideas and suggestions. That way, both company and designer profit.

4: It’s Top Management Business

In successful companies, there is often a special relationship between design and CEOs.
In the early years of Sony, Norio Ohga stablished a distinctive design and later became Sony’s President and Chairman. Steve Jobs of Apple had a great passion for design and spent a great amount of of his time discussing with his designers. Elon Musk takes design so serious that he personally leads all product design and engineering at Tesla.

Design is a strategic resource to envision, to innovate, and to create compelling offerings. It must be concern of top management.

5: Multi-modal and Transparent Communication

Genuine cooperation requires understanding, trust and openness with everyone involved. A designer needs to understand every aspect of the design project, from top management strategy to shop-floor production issues. Therefore treat everybody as a partner, from the CEO to the shop floor worker. Always communicate openly and transparently, and present ideas in a multi-modal manner: visually, with sketches and renderings; in a haptic manner, with 3D models or material samples; and verbally, explaining the reasoning and story behind the design.

6: Design does not stop

Design does not end when the designer stops working. Once a product or service enters the market, it enters a conversation with its customers. Consumers will interpret your offering as part of your brand and against the backdrop of competing offerings. Consumer feedback and consumer experiences must be fed back into the design process to iteratively innovate.

Remember: Innovation almost never fails because of a lack of ideas, but because of a lack of persistence. Innovation must be a systemic capability, and design a core competence. It is not just about a new product or service: it is also about values, experiences, processes and networks.

Designing Better Design Support

In the course of previous design support programs, it happened that companies wanted support, but weren’t actually willing to cooperate with a designer. Other companies found that in the midst of a consultation they can’t go forward because of a lack of budget. In another case, a company delayed production until after the support program ended, then produced the design with small alterations in order to cut out the designer.

In order to avoid this kind of issues, a design cooperation support program should audit both designers and companies (more about a design audit below), then monitor design projects and their implementation by a company, regularly follow up both with designer and company, and go forward with defined milestones. Like in every partnership, also Design Collaboration only works when everybody involved behaves fairly and has a genuine intent to make it work.

Conducting a Design Audit

A design audit is conducted on the basis of the portfolio and CV of a designer and must be conducted by people with a solid knowledge of design. The audit analyzes along 5 axes of ability. As each ability is analyzed, candidates receive a point score from 0 to 6. The highest possible score is 30. Candidates with the highest score should go on to have a conversation and a vision presentation.

Audit 1: Innovativeness

Innovation is the lifeblood of new business. What is the degree of a designer’s innovative thought? Does the portfolio show conventional thought and pre-made templates, or does it include innovative approaches and interesting experiments? Analyzing the degree of novel thought of a designer helps you to gauge how innovative his work will be.

Score scale: 0 for using pre-made templates, up to 3 for moderately original projects, 6 for highly innovative projects.

Audit 2: Stance

An often overlooked, but important part is played by the stance of a designer. There are three general stances which I call copiers, egoists and altruists. Does the designer have a tendency to copy other designs, does he develop primarily his own design style, or is he developing distinctive designs for different clients? If the designer applies one style across all products and companies, his interest is more in developing himself than the clients he works for. The best designers always strive to develop the brand and image of a client company rather then their own.

Score scale: 0 for copying, 1-2 for uni-style designers, 3-6 for a designer having developed a range of different successful designs for different clients.

Audit 3: Skill Spectrum

How does the skill of the designer fit to the project at hand? Is the designer a specialist working in a narrow area or does he work across disciplines? The wider the spectrum of a designer, the better is the chance he will be able to deal with the complexity of consumer demands, company needs and market pressures and come up with appropriate solutions. However, if the skill fits the project, a designer who is great in a particular area is a better choice than a designer who does many things, but none of them particularly well. If you are looking to work not with a single designer, but a design team, pay special attention to cooperation readiness and skills complementing each other.

Score scale: 0-1 for a narrow single discipline specialist, 2-3 for designers working across more than one design discipline (such as industrial design, graphic design, interactive design), 4-6 for a multi-disciplinary designer with additional experience in related disciplines such as business administration, engineering, marketing.

Audit 4: Business Experience

Does the designer have experience with business processes, company dynamics and corporate structures? In large and medium-sized companies, corporate experience helps to understand the needs of a company, to navigate business processes and to bring a design to market in an effective manner. Ultimately, ideas need to be implemented, company departments need to be involved, and possible production, delivery and sales issues solved. In small companies with flat hierarchies, corporate experience is less important, but a good understanding of business processes is still vital for bringing a design to market.

Score scale: 0 for no business experience, 1-2 for beginner experience and internships, 3-4 for experience in some projects, 5-6 for an extensive corporate and business experience.

Audit 5: Cooperation Readiness

Did the designer cooperate with others or is he a “lone wolf”? Cooperation can be learned, and experience in cooperations for different projects helps to facilitate a successful design development process and overcome adversities. The work style of a designer is equally important: this can be more theoretical or more practical. Theorists without hands-on capabilities often have trouble in implementation. A solely hands-on approach, on the other hand, might lack the consideration required for a design project. Approaching design from both theoretical and practical viewpoints is most useful.

Score scale: from 0 for poor cooperation readiness to 6 for a person with extensive cooperation experience, both theoretically and practically.

(C) Mario Gagliardi 2021. Published by Dongdaemun Design Plaza/ddp Design Fair/Seoul Design Foundation.

Part 1 (English)

Part 2 (English)

December 26, 2021

Exclusion included: Hostile design

Lately, a young designer with a bachelor’s degree from Parsons School of Design approached me with his design for a bench for a design competition for better public spaces. After having asked a few questions, it became clear that sitting a bit longer on this bench, or lying on it to have a nap, was made intentionally painful by the designer: the contortions of the bench shape – its curvature and changing heights – limit sitting on it to just a few minutes, no more than half an hour. It is intentional that there is no backrest, and it is intentional that it is impossible to lie down on this bench. The reason: this bench is supposed to make public places, in the words of the designer, “homeless-free zones”.

The public space is, by definition, for the general public. Only in dictatorships, groups of people are excluded from participation. Also people with disabilities or the elderly might need to have a rest longer than a few minutes. In aging societies such as Japan or Korea, the majority of the public are senior citizens. In these societies, this bench excludes the majority.

A design which intentionally excludes particular members of society – in this case its most vulnerable groups – is anti-social and lacks respect for human beings. This kind of design has a name: hostile design. Aware of this, the young designer was proud to avoid obvious signs of hostility such as metal spikes, instead camouflaging its inhumane intent with rounded edges and curves.

Homeless people are among society’s most vulnerable groups. In Los Angeles, 16% of homeless have a physical disability, 22% have a mental illness, and 28% experienced domestic violence. Some 10% of homeless are veterans of the US armed forces. After serving their country, they often have physical disabilities and mental trauma from the battlefield.

People sleep on the street because they might have been driven out of their homes by domestic violence, or they might have lost their job and cannot any more afford ever-increasing rental prices. Once on the street, they are exposed to extreme weather and are defenseless against abuse and crime.

Nearly 50.000 people are homeless in Los Angeles, a city of 3.9 million. In comparison, only 100 people are homeless in Vienna, Austria, a city of 1.9 million people, half the population of Los Angeles.

Driving out the homeless through hostile design cannot work: also the homeless have to be somewhere. The solution to homelessness is simple: giving the homeless homes. In Vienna, several organizations exist to help the homeless and other vulnerable groups. Homelessness is a societal problem, and it is solved by social means.

These benches in Vienna invite you to lounge around for as long as you wish

September 27, 2021

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

Design Integration: From Imitation to Ecosystem

This article was first published in Fall 2005 in Designmatters by the Danish Design Center (DDC) as ‘Imiteret, kommercialiseret, oplevet: Sammenkædningen af design, virksomheder og denverdensøkonomiske udvikling’.

Company structures changed dramatically over the course of the last century. The structures and processes behind the production of goods evolved, and with these also the relationships of products and their users.

(more…)

March 19, 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

Analysing lifestyle changes during and after the pandemic

Changes in lifestyles are always consequences of changing life circumstances. On an individual level, this includes education, income, or age; On a macro level, this includes, among other factors, political change, governance, and technical progress.

Lifestyle changes on an individual level are simple to understand: For instance, an increased or decreased income instantly affects individual purchasing behaviour. Macro level changes, on the other hand, often have multiple causes which create cause and effect chains. For instance, a small change in government policy concerning the taxation of the housing market can lead to large changes in wider market dynamics which in turn affect the wealth and welfare of large swathes of a population.

The current pandemic is an example of a global macro level change, as it endangers the health of populations worldwide. So does fast food, for instance, but a disease such as Covid 19 is faster in its detrimental effects on individual health.

The effect of a virus on individual health becomes quickly obvious, while the effects of government response to a virus takes more time to be noticeable. A country can successfully keep infections down through measures such as social distancing and isolation, but these measures can at the same time hold back vital economic interactions. The same measures which might avert a public health threat can cause an economic decline.

These chains of causes and effects affect changes in consumer needs and demands. A recent analysis of internet search words by The Economist reveals a few short-time indicators for lifestyle changes during the pandemic. As many had been confined to their homes, personal at-home activities such as working out at home (searches for dumbbells or Strava) or homemade arts and crafts (searches for tie-die or painting by numbers) surged.

Long-term changes are more important, however, as they result in fundamental changes in spending. Here are some of the long-term changes we predict:

High end traveling
In tourism, high-end businesses catering to high income consumers will have an easier time to regain market share. However, mass tourism on the level before Covid 19 will take a long time to recover.

More affordable basic services
The already existing trend towards informal and basic services (delivery services, personal transport) will increase as more nonessential jobs are lost as a consequence of isolation measures. The increased competition will also cause a downward price pressure on basic services without differentiator.

Decentralization of institutions
Institutions and infrastructure which until now was based on on centralized real estate will eventually have to be decentralized: Homes for the elderly, dormitories for migrant workers, or prisons are all based on cramming large numbers of vulnerable people together and hence became major infection hotspots.

Working from home
Also offices cram large numbers of people together. Working from home will therefore, at least for a segment of the population, become an integrated part of their lifestyle (see also Home, sweet home). Consequently, also businesses and services connected to offices – the office real estate market, inner city restaurants catering to office workers, or public transport systems – will be affected.

August 13, 2020

After Corona: Quality is back

The lockdowns and restrictions imposed by governments due to the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in many being furloughed or losing jobs. Consequently, it is expected that discretionary spending would decrease. In particular, businesses depending on day to day consumer traffic (restaurants, brick and mortar retail) or on gatherings of people (theatres, sports events) have been a marked disadvantage. However, spending at high quality restaurants is back to or above pre-Covid levels. Why is that?

There is a new perception, and it affects both discretionary and casual spending. Restaurant offerings which mainly relied on location to attract passing trade but did not offer distinctive value – such as premium ingredients, culinary creativity and skill – find out that they have, in current times with less passing trade, little to attract customers. For offerings with distinctive value, on the other hand, it is worth going to, even if prices are high.

A similar phenomenon appears in the luxury sector. Pre-Covid luxury often relied entirely on brand value. Many established luxury brands offered products without special materials or craftsmanship, yet have been able to justify high prices solely through brand recognition. These established luxury brands grew especially in the aspirational sector, sought out by middle-class consumers who seek to demonstrate status through commonly understood brand symbols such as Louis Vuitton or Prada.

After Corona, consumer perception and behaviour is changing. The commonly understood semantic brand value becomes less important than actual quality. When more people in society are economically struggling, the practice of flaunting a luxury item in public – the main reason why large-brand luxury items are bought in the first place – quickly becomes dubious. Just witness the social media backlash over Instagram influencers who continued to flaunt their branded luxury goods during Corona.

“You can’t just continue as usual. You can’t flaunt your wealth and your privilege at a time when things are really tough for lots of people. It’s alienating and it’s embarrassing.”
Camille Charriere, London-based influencer

In the post-Covid economic environment, main consumption motivators have changed. Flaunting a brand as a signal of privilege is socially less acceptable. The actual quality of an offering becomes more important in terms of material, craftsmanship and creativity. The last decade was about the rise of branded mass luxury driven by aspirational consumers eager on social signaling. After Corona, the focus has shifted. Actual quality is back, also with high prices, while the value of brands mainly driven by social signaling has decreased.

May 31, 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

Podchain, ownership and usership

Car ownership was a fundamental idea of progress since Henry Ford came up with his Model T in the early 20th century. During America’s golden years, roughly from the nineteen- fifties until 9/11, owning a car was the first thing on every teenager’s mind. It was a sign of freedom and independence, the visible expression of the American dream, and ultimately a social necessity. The car you owned showed who you are, what you like, and where you stand in the social hierarchy.

Things have changed. Millennials own less cars than previous generations. Notorious traffic jams, CO2 pollution and parking problems make car ownership in cities difficult, and smartphone- based ride-hailing services such as Uber make it less necessary.

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October 29, 2019

On mental models, refusing a five billion dollar offer, and petting a cobra

Mental models are ideas of how things are. They are not about how things are in reality – they are beliefs about how things work or should work. People’s mental models can be wrong. If they are, they tend to be persistent, creating problems and at the same time impeding the ability to fix these problems. Here are two real-world stories about mental models.

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October 29, 2019

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

In Memoriam Alessandro Mendini

New bridge for the Accademia, Alessandro Mendini, Biennale di Venezia, 1985

In European living spaces, the classical credenza was an important interior object full of meaning. Depending on the household, it was in the the kitchen or in the dining room, containing objects which could reveal the status, memory and history of a family – plates, cutlery, candlesticks.

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March 12, 2019

Like friends, follow uses

Digital machines such as smartphones frame behavior and instill new cultural and social practices. ‘Liking’, ‘sharing’, ‘following’ are relational activities which have been defined by social media and established as new normal in the shaping of human relationships. The phenomenon of communication devices prompting new behaviors and expressions is not new: for instance, the word “hello” did not exist until the development of the telephone.

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May 15, 2018

Design DIY

Until the late 20th century, the process of design was mainly top-down: design was being made by designers, produced by manufacturers, and branded by corporations. In the 21st century, these processes of production and consumption are being rethought. The design process has to become circular.

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January 26, 2018

Three approaches to the design process

The design process as it is usually taught and applied at the beginning of the 21st century is concerned with goals, aims and targets. It is dealing with business and industry, target groups and financial targets. It is looking at the often “wicked” problems found in all areas of life. It is, in general, working with – or trying to work with – the world, its structures and problems, including its systems, its territories, its politics and power struggles. But is this the only way the design process can be approached?
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December 25, 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