Buy this product; we have writers standing by
By 
Today Very Short List pointed us towards a site called Unhappyhipsters in which images like the one above are fetched from the pages of Dwell magazine and then given small narrative indicators that give them new meaning.
"It become their routine…" Wonderful.
Last week, on the post on Significant Objects, I contemplated a commercial world in which new products came with narratives attached, new meanings, which we could use to reimagine our present circumstances.
I just bought a new bag from Tumi. My last one gave up the ghost last week in Seattle. I like the idea of getting messages from Tumi as it imagines the things that are or could be happening to me. With a link to my TripIt file, Tumi could know where I am, even, if I allowed it, what hotel I was staying it. With GPS location permission, I could have a rough idea of my circumstances. All of this data makes it possible to feed me a stream of narrative suggestions that are plausible at least by time and place.
Oh, alright. This isn’t quite right. But the idea remains promising. Consumer goods, thanks to brands and meaning makers in the world of marketing, have always come with meanings. And they will continue to do so. But in addition to these quite general meanings, it is possible for the brand to communicate many more particular meanings. As long as they some how resonate with what is happening in my life, they will be interesting and fun. Animating, actually.
"We have writers standing by!" When does this become a brand promise?
References
The Very Short List treatment is here.
The Unhappy Hipsters website is here.
5 Comments
February 1st, 2010 at 7:06 pm
grant, have to admit that is one of the more perplexing of your posts. but i think we’ve covered this ground before – there are those that wish, desire and imbue a multitude of meanings from the objects and brands that they interact with every day, and those that would prefer not to believe that these objects are containers for such significance.
a bunch of things cross my mind. the first is the distinction between intelligence and meaning. in what way is a smart TUMI bag going to provide you with meaning? I suppose if it is somehow programmed to remain close to you and never leave your side, you would be assured some kind of companionship which would produce meaning. but a bag that delivers intelligent and unknown information?
is this a distinction between old and new school? the assignment of meaning manufacture? you seem to be asking for technology to provide the meaning. but that’s more like clap-on clap-off than real meaning, isn’t it?
there seems to be, without a doubt, a struggle between who is in power when it comes to the creation of significance. i find it hard to believe that you would celebrate a proposition that delivers significance that wouldn’t otherwise exist (your TUMI’s memory of your possible forays?)
instead, shouldn’t we imagine propositions that re-ignite those aspects of ourselves that have been forgotten, or re-imagine the possibilities of what could be? or is this a boomer thing? idealistic and revolutionary to the very end? addicted to convenience and technology?
case in point (possibly irrelevant, but worthy nonetheless): http://www.cordarounds.com/
February 2nd, 2010 at 4:26 am
With UPS and RFID, Tumi could track your bag as it moves through space and time, making it a “spime”. If the spime object was something that might be owned by several people in its life – a car, say, rather than a bag – then it would make sense for that object to have its own website. You, the current spime wrangler, could edit the site (or at least your part of the site), as its owner pro tem. The spime’s other stakeholders – for a car: its manufacturer, the garage servicing it, its previous owners, etc – could also contribute to the site and track the car’s location and performance through time.
Perhaps only for art works and rare violins do we currently track ownership and location in this way. But there’s no technical reason stopping us doing it for any object. A while back, I wrote something on how we might do this technically, here:
http://www.vukutu.com/blog/2008/10/a-data-architecture-for-spimes/
February 2nd, 2010 at 7:43 am
The idea of the products we purchase and use in our lives having a narrative is so exciting. At this point a ton of people will ask themselves what the value of this kind of technological and sociological fusion will be. “What’s the point of my bag telling me where it is? I already KNOW”
Of course history tells us that when the technology is at a tipping point and accessible by a large proportion of our society, we will find a way to make it useful and relevant, we’ll develop behavior that encompasses this new foible in our existence.
“Why should I ever want my phone to be more than a phone?!? I want to make calls and that’s it!”
“Why would I want a portable computer? If I want to use one, I’ll go to the desktop?!?”
“Why would I want to log on to a website to tell people what I’m doing in 140 characters or less?!? Who would want to know?”
Imagine if Tumi hired a hotshot writer who coupled with RFID and UPS technology would ping you when your luggage gets lost by United Airlines. Rather than a simple “baggage not arrived” type of message it would be rich and full of context, it would talk about how on the treacherous voyage from Seattle to Atlanta it lost its way – but is now on the way back to you. It would make the unbearable sinking feeling of losing your luggage a little bit more bearable. It would give you a story. You would talk about it to your friends. And then? Well nobody really knows where it would go from there. But it would be awesome to find out!
February 2nd, 2010 at 10:23 am
Sorry – meant to write GPS, not UPS, in first line of comment #2.
February 5th, 2010 at 5:11 pm
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