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November 30, 2007

Trending 2008 into cool towns

Where is the market headed for 2008? While those who read this website often aren't tracking such knowledge since they're the trendsetters, a valued resource in discovering what trends they're setting is through Trendwatching and their report, 8 important consumer trends for 2008. Here's a look at each one and how they apply to cool towns:

1. Status Spheres - "a variety of lifestyles, activities and persuasions, which can be mixed and matched by consumers looking for recognition from various crowds and scenes." Example: Prius drivers. Cool town status sphere? People who co-develop/crowdsource their own places to live, work and play.

2. Premiumization - "no industry, no sector, no product will escape a premium version in the next 12 months." Example: Bottled water. Cool town premiumization? How about a de-premiumization of urban lofts that are high style and low cost.

3. Snack Culture - "embodies the phenomenon of products, services and experiences becoming more temporary and transient; products that are being deconstructed in easier to digest, easier to afford bits, making it possible to collect even more experiences, as often as possible, in an even shorter timeframe." Example: Smart cars, H&M. Cool town snack culture? Car sharing, bike sharing, ipads.

4. Online Oxygen - "control-craving consumers needing online access as much as they need oxygen". Example: Mobile phone ubiquity. Cool town online oxygen? Ubiquitous wi-fi access (ie a digital infrastructure replacing an asphalt one).

5. Eco-Iconic - "eco-friendly goods and services sporting bold, iconic design and markers, that help their eco-conscious owners to visibly tout their eco-credentials to peers. Example: Honda FCX Clarity. Cool town eco-iconic? The upcoming crowdsourced Elements green restaurant in Washington DC.

6. Brand Butlers - "assisting consumers in smart, relevant ways, making the most of your products and whatever it is your brand stands for." Example: Charmin restrooms. Cool town brand butler? Developers allowing beta communities to co-develop their own places via collaborative websites.

7. MIY - Make It Yourself - "digitally designing products from scratch, then having them turned into real physical goods." Example: Ponoko. Cool town MIY? Of course, there's the co-development of a place, but beta community members can potentially digitally design their own residences.

8. Crowdmining - "when co-creating, co-funding, co-buying, co-designing, co-managing *anything* with 'crowds', the emphasis in 2008 will move from just getting the masses in, to mining those crowds for the rough and polished diamonds." Example: Netflix's $1 million prize for how to best predict consumer movie preferences. Cool town crowdmining? Identifying and rewarding the best designers, from architecture to logo design.

Image source: Your Daddy.

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November 29, 2007

Apartment Therapy's Fall Colors 2007 winner

If you're looking for color inspiration when it comes to home interior design, it'll be tough to find a better source than the annual Apartment Therapy Fall Colors 2007 contest. Apartment Therapy itself is one of the best daily resources for apartment design.

This year's winner hails from a couple in Chinatown, Los Angeles. See a full range of rather stellar photos here. From the home owners, "We have never seen white as the starting point to develop a color scheme...in our apartment, which is in Chinatown, blood red is the starting point and the palette moves on from there. The apartment is all about fun. Every decision we made about color was made with the goal of creating a joyful, playful place to be for kids and grown-ups alike."

If you don't think color has much of an impact, read some of the feedback...

"God, I love this space so much I want to marry it!"
"Holy Crap! What a great space."
"Wow! This is the most beautiful red room I have ever seen!"
"This is by FAR my favorite space. The color is amazing..."

Check out the runners-up here, and the profile of the 2006 winners "here.

Color is probably one of the most underestimated yet cost effective means of creating attractive places - you can learn more on how to get color assistance here.

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November 28, 2007

When you can't get enough outdoor dining

Especially for cities with great weather all year round, restaurants often find themselves with fully occupied seating areas outside, and empty tables inside. So, like the open air cinemas of Athens, some restaurants have adapted by turning their interior spaces toward the outdoors.

Notice that much of the interior ground floor of this restaurant in Buenos Aires has a patio feeling, while the equivalent amount on the second floor is open to the sky. Some restaurants, like The Reef in Adams Morgan, Washington DC, continue providing such rooftop space in the chillier months via an impermanent enclosed tent with heat lamps.

The benefit is not only to those within the restaurant - there is an added sense of vitality that the diners bring to the street, the vibrancy of an outdoor cafe times three.

Now, imagine a square surrounded by a series of buildings like these, decorated with even more outdoor diners in the center square - like experiencing a grand outdoor restaurant or a dining festival, every day.

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November 27, 2007

The neighborhood center for creatives in 'BAires'

With the rise of creatives and design in 'BAires' (the edgy name for Buenos Aires), especially in the neighborhood of Palermo, as described in the previous post, it would seem fitting that good design would inspire a central, identifiable gathering place to inspire creative discussion. That would be Serrano Square (pictured).

Surrounding the rather intimate square are no less than twenty restaurants, bars and clubs, all with outdoor seating. In the center of the square, local merchants provide their wares in an open market, with a children's playground in the other half of the square - an ironic site at night in the middle of thousands of people walking throughout the square. On Sundays, the retail merchants present their merchandise along the sidewalks in front of their stores. Throughout my trip to Buenos Aires, I found myself returning to Serrano Square over and over, six blocks from the subway and connected via an extensive bus network. It was the natural meeting spot for creatives - the equivalent of the neighborhood coffeehouse, but as the neighborhood square instead.

As its success and popularity continues to grow, it would seem a natural progression to allow the over-crowded outdoor tables to extend further into the street, replacing the auto-congested streets separating the diners from the square itself - perhaps similar to the pedestrian zone in Temple Bar, Dublin, Ireland.

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November 26, 2007

The rise of design in Buenos Aires

Here's one way to transform an industrial city like Buenos Aires, Argentina into a mecca for design and creativity, though this is definitely doing it the hard way...

Take one economic crash in 2001 where the peso's (Argentian's dollar) is devalued from 1:1 with every U.S. dollar to 1:3 with every U.S. dollar. Suddenly companies had to shed workforces in order to stay in business, forcing people out of secure jobs and without a means of finding new ones with companies unless they were to accept much less than they were previously. So, many of them were pretty much forced to start their own businesses, the very businesses that many of them dreamed of running for years, but never had that compelling reason to do so. Survival is pretty darn compelling.

So, it turns out a nascent community of design and film talent in Buenos Aires was cocooning, just waiting to blossom. As you may know, creativity is correlated to economic growth, so it should be no surprise that one of its most popular, economically vibrant (and increasingly more expensive to live in) neighborhoods today is known as Palermo Hollywood, a financially depressed, seldom visited neighborhood prior to the economic crash.

Image: A typical design-oriented store in Palermo.

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