I wrote an article last week (it appeared in the Irish Times) on the rising aesthetic standard of everyday objects. I didn't simply want to say that the iPod is beautiful or that my Sony phone is a cool anthracite.
I mean the aesthetic standard people are now setting is closer to glamour than mere luxury. What are screen communicators, whether web site developers, ad agencies, or TV producers going to do about it?Glamour is the new luxury. How things look is not only important, it opens markets.
When the sports apparel maker Umbro wanted to take a slice of the fashion market, it went to world famous hat designer Philip Treacy and asked him to design a range of sports shoes. Umbro explained to me that their objective was to take a slice of the middle market but to do that they needed first to capture the luxury end. That in turn meant appealing to the baby boomer, the never-get-old customer who can pay $300 for sports shoes.
Capturing that glamour end of the market means further down market kids will do a bit of copy cat buying.
There are two fascinating elements to the logic. The first is that the '60s generation is back defining trends in what we wear. The second is the vital ingredient – not just how something looks but how many senses it excites.
The Internet's visual appeal is by contrast woeful. Though IT companies have abandoned some of the functional boxes from the 1980s and 1990s, software interfaces, web sites, and even television on the internet, often looks plain bad.
In the article I praised Microsoft's Vista for at least being adventurous visually and a Microsoft aide replied, well they'll be flattered to be put in the same company as Treacy and co.
That of course was stretching the point. Nonetheless I wonder what the IT industry can do to up its visual presence. The time when IT is a reserve for geeks is well and truly over (particularly as media and IT converge). It's time for a little more everyday glamour.
