With so much turmoil in the marketplace in recent years, brands have taken a beating. Things were so much easier when it required a ton of investment dollars to launch a product. Now people just have to come up with a decent idea, find a third world sweatshop to produce the thing inexpensively, offer it to consumers either through a shake-and-bake e-commerce website or through eBay, and ship via one of several worldwide delivery services. If you’re both savvy and lucky, you strike it rich (e.g. Fubu). Of course that’s the extreme example. More likely some small, low-overhead outfit will drop prices on their commodity product and force large, well-known and well-respected companies to follow suit (sometimes forced to do so by all-powerful retailers) resulting in lower-quality products which strain consumer brand loyalty.

With so much change about, what’s a well-heeled company to do? Well, seems the latest thing is contacting the local neuromarketing outfit and scanning a few brains. For an interesting – if somewhat dated – article on what that is and how it (supposedly) works, check out “There’s a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex” by collision detection blogger Clive Thompson.

{via O’Reilly Radar}

Considering the appalling lack of progress in securing the U.S. against terrorist attack (wasn’t there yet another story last week about how some other national security issue deadline has come and gone without so much as a national blink?), I found this entry over on the New World Notes blog of interest. It’s a nice little recreation of a New England town inside Second Life (heck, it looks like some towns near me) intended to be used to aid in security response preparation (hence the name of the sim: Response). But I couldn’t find a door that would open or a finished interior, so that was a little disappointing. And the prim usage seemed a bit extreme for details that could probably have been foregone to allow for some of the additional functionality that an interior space might provide. But then again, I don’t know the specifications so what’s there might serve its intended purpose. I certainly hope so. But maybe there should at least be a sign in that sim, listing all the real world deadlines that are being missed. A sense of urgency would certainly seem in order in both worlds. Oh well, it’s still interesting to see virtual constructs used for real world purposes.

Fast Company has an intriguing interview with Richard Florida, author of The Flight of the Creative Class and moving force behind CreativeClass.org (which to be honest I’ve not paid particular attention). Considering I responded to a Nussbaum blog entry this morning with my take on how uninformed the industrial design community seems to be, I thought this particular comment by Florida interesting:

I think our {Western} education system brings people together who might not otherwise interact, and in that more social sense it can be an extremely useful incubator. But our K-12 system, and even our universities now to some extent, are still stuck in an industrial-age mindset. Churning out factory workers for assembly lines served us very well 50 years ago; in the creative economy, it’s a recipe for stagnation, not success.

I’d point out that even the so-called “creative” disciplines are churning out factory laborers; people so focused on the minutiae they don’t see the big picture. How else can anyone otherwise explain the dumbfounding lack of understanding for intellectual property laws that directly affect anyone involved in a creative pursuit? I don’t blame the system – the schools that determine the curriculum or the corporations that take advantage of the uninformed. We “creative”‘s (and also those who aren’t actively employed in a creative field but are none-the-less engaged in creative pursuits) have no one to blame but ourselves.

Media Daily News is carrying a story on brand placement in videogames titled “The Games People Play, Sponsors Apparently Don’t” which includes commentary by Henry Jenkins, comparative media studies professor at MIT. For anyone who has been following advertising in videogames and virtual worlds, there’s nothing terribly interesting here; the big clue-in for the uninformed appears to be the concept of using more than virtual billboards to advertise a real world brand and doing it tactfully. But in all honesty, if that’s as far as the suggestions go, then someone needs to tell the experts they need to think outside of the advertising box. These are virtual worlds… almost anything we can imagine is possible, so stretch those imagination muscles and come up with ways to advertise that are simply impossible in the real world. If the best the experts have is suggesting that televisions inside videogames should be showing real commercials, they’re not grokking the possibilities. I would imagine Mr. Jenkins is savvy enough to see those possibilities, I’m just unsure why he and others aren’t talking about the mind-blowing ways available to advertise inside these worlds.

{via MIT Adverlab}

Last night I was on the phone discussing the very thing I’ve just caught on design website Inhabitat with Accelerating Change salon-boy Jerry Paffendorf: variable-geometry product architectures of the kind being explored by FutureFactories. It’s interesting that it comes up because a couple months ago a variable-geometry shape evaluation tool for designers called Genometri was discussed over on the Core77 design website. From what I understand that tool to be, I personally don’t think it makes much sense; for the most part designers know which shapes they want to evaluate, so having a program generate, say, a thousand variations is a bit overkill when they might only want to see two or three variations before making a final decision. However, if a designer controls the variability, as appears to be the case with Lionel Theodore Dean’s FutureFactories effort, it makes quite a bit of sense. A designer could limit the variations by carefully setting the parameters; and as Jerry said, consumers can just use sliders to get the individualized shape they want for their product (which is exactly how avatar shapes in Second Life are generated). But Dean’s effort gets to the point I was making with Jerry that even Isaac Asimov in his old short story titled “The Profession” (which I read maybe 30 years ago, can’t find any reference to today, and would appreciate someone correcting me if I have the title or the author wrong so I can post a link to it), understood that someone has to remain outside the programmed “system” to create “out of the box” breakthroughs societies need for continued growth and development. Someone has to dream up the latest computer chip architecture for which average programmers write code. Someone has to create the base avatar shape upon which the sliders operate. Someone has to conjure up the sandbox in which most people will play, and occasionally change it’s shape.

{Image Copyright © Lionel Theodore Dean}