Is smaller becoming better?

First, the facts:

World Wildlife Federation (WWF) research shows people are consuming resources 20% faster than our ability to support renewal. The amount of natural resources used compared with what nature can support increased 2.5 times over the past 40 years, with the average North American using twice that of Europeans, and seven times that of Asians or Africans.

The mass production economy of the last century brought bigger houses, yards, closets, cars,

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The Design Economy

In the spirit of the newly refined

Town Studios website!... today’s focus is on design.

In a globalizing economy based on mass production and commoditization, the business of design is more than ever the path to productivity and profit, not to mention a sense of soul.  What elements does this design economy entail?  Fast Company magazine provides a look:

Be project-based: Aka the hollywood model, creativity thrives when there’s a finite beginning and end (like

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“Open DJ” night drawing crowds…

Ever feel so good about a song or two that you wished you could play it for a crowd?  Ever had a desire to be the DJ at a nightclub, even for just 15 minutes?

Well, since you can mass customize your new car, new home, and even your restaurant dinner or your shoes, you can do the same for your night out.  In this Washington Post article, iPod Nights Turn Amateurs Into Digital DJs at D.C. Club (expires Mar. 10), you can get your 15 minutes of fame by bringing

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We are evolving into a customer-driven economy, where customers are so well-informed that they’re actually often the best suited to design and develop their own products and services.

Linux, the computer operating system that has all but ended Microsoft’s dominance in the server market, when founder Linus Torvalds sought an alternative to closed, proprietary operating systems and began writing a new one for free, inspiring others to join him via collective volunteering, or crowdsourcing, thus

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The “age of I”

What is the “age of I”?  Individualism with a sense of community.

The movement from mass production to mass customization is becoming standard practice.  How does this relate to us as individuals and our psyche?  As quoted by one Fortune 500 executive* in BusinessWeek:

“I think this “age of I” is our biggest opportunity and our biggest challenge. This idea that people want to be individuals and want to belong at the same time is a huge concept. It used to be if you belonged

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BusinessWeek: The Vanishing Mass Market (New poll up!)

BusinessWeek: The Vanishing Mass Market

The new American aspiration is to stand out from the crowd, not keep up with the crowd.

The July 12, 2004 cover story of BusinessWeek features the shift from a mass media, mass production economy to an individual-targeted, mass customization one.  People don’t want to be normal and part of a consumer crowd, they want to be unique yet part of a real community.  This graphic from the magazine

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Motion picture studios know why some of their movies become hits - positive word-of-mouth that becomes viral.  Great critical reviews do not correlate with box office returns.  In this knowledge age, that buzz is being used to make better movies via test screenings before they’re released, and online fan review boards for sequels and related genre films.  This is especially becoming more prevalent in TV show production, where fans have increasingly more say on the content of upcoming shows,

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How does one interpret a CoolTown market?

In other words, how do you transform the vision of hundreds or thousands of future CoolTown tenants into a built place that is greater than the sum of their opinions?

The simple answer?  Talent.  More specifically, people who both truly understand the CoolTown market and know how to design and develop communities.

The challenge is that the people with the greatest design and development capability are either no longer part of the CoolTown market or

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The art of interpreting what the market really wants

What distinguishes a successful company from a bankrupt one is how well they interpret what the market really wants into something the market will pay for.

Ford did a tremendous amount of homework in the early 1980s to understand that people wanted a sedan (insert ‘community’ here) that was uniquely beautiful in a sea of look-alikes, handled as well as the imports, and focused on quality design details from opening windows to playing

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How to truly understand what the market really wants, #2 of 2: Ethnography

Ethnography: The branch of anthropology that deals with the scientific description of specific human cultures.

The best way to understand something is to participate, as defined by zooming yesterday, but that’s probably a bit too radical for most.  The next best way is to practice ethnography.

This great article will give you a much better idea of how to apply this science as an art in the real world.  It

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How to truly understand what the market really wants, #1 of 2: Zooming

Taking a page from Freaky Friday, the only way one can completely understand a teenager if you’re a mom, and vice versa, is to become the other.  Business guru Seth Godin refers to this as *zooming.

For those who wish to understand the CoolTown market:  Unless you’re willing to try living in the city and/or giving up your car for a month, emptying out your bank account and hanging out and conversing with an entirely

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What? Only 20% of the market follow through?

The industry average says only 20% of potential home buyers who put a refundable $1000 deposit on a future community (that they have some say in), end up buying.

Using my favorite principle of Occam’s Razor (the simplest answer is usually the right one), that means only 20% of them got what they really wanted.  Of course, using the Industrial Economy Developer’s Razor, that means 80% of them didn’t know what they really wanted.

Take it even

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Myth: The market doesn’t really know what they want

There’s probably no more over-used philosophy in product development.

You’d think this would apply to fashion, yet Blue Cult’s new jeans are insanely popular because women feel they’re finally being listened to, while individually customized jeans and even shoes are fast becoming the norm.

It’s bad enough in general, but rather disastrous when applied to building communities.  For instance, another product that “we didn’t know we wanted”

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Q&A: Shouldn’t people come before buildings?

As a civic/community-building practitioner, I often observe a disconnect in how communities approach initiatives to create vibrant places. For instance, the popular place-based initiatives… with new urbanist designs often overlook the necessary visioning work on ‘softer’ issues, viewing (instead) the physical changes as the essential ingredients in community transformation. How will CoolTown integrate civic/community-building aspects within its

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Make your own rules

When you have an abundance of local culture, you start breaking mass-traditions in favor of something more meaningful.

Hawaii is well known locally as almost being another country since its diversity of food, customs and even conversation language is so unique compared to the mainland United States.  This pervasive diversity breeds an openness to new ideas, where it’s not so much that one of the signs pictured here reflects the local cowboy community in this central

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Have it your way - your town that is

The business system by the economy will evolve where we will see customer-driven products and services as a basic expectation is called mass customization - a “system of combining the low unit costs of mass production processes with the flexibility of individual customization.“

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A cool town is truly people-driven

What makes a CoolTown unique is that the people who will actually live and work there get to be involved in its design from the very beginning.  Fair huh?  Typically today, a community’s stakeholders use the charrette to plan the town from the ground up.  Once the project is approved by the City several months later, only then would it be marketed to future tenants, already designed.

Now, suppose a number of employers desired a main street of loft offices,

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