Shit is getting real

As the news of Russian Ambassador Andrey Karlov’s assassination hit news sites and social feeds around the world it played out like a film, so close to a spy thriller that if shown in a theatre the critics would rate it cliche.

The opening scene takes places in the parliamentary heart of Turkey, the capital Ankara, at the opening of a photography exhibition. But not just any exhibition, titled ‘Russia through Turks eyes’, it was opened by the Russian ambassador to Turkey and was a symbol Russia and Turkey’s strengthening ties after a decade of hostility.

The first picture we see is of the Ambassador, a caricature of a diplomat that would fit into a Frank Miller graphic novel. He is giving a press conference in drab tones, heavy eyelids behind his glasses.

To his left, in soft focus we see a young man who a first glance would dismiss as a member of security. Someone we have become accustomed to seeing floating around distinguished persons in distinguished places.

But then he delivers the fatal blow, shooting the ambassador several times in the back. Karlov falls to the floor, flat on his back, arms splayed out. His glasses thrown to the back of the room reveal the force of the impact.

 

The gunman after shooting the Russian ambassador. Credit Burhan Ozbilici/Associated Press

Now the man in the background comes into clear focus, he cuts a svelte figure, clean shaven, in a black suit, holding his weapon low you can tell he knows how to use it. Closely resembling a Turkish Roger Moore, his name is Mevlut Mert Altintas and he has since been identified as the an off duty police officer from Aydin.

He stares fiercely ahead at the certain death that awaits him, but also the immortality in which he will be preserved, forever to be judged by history for his performance as a murderer, martyr, villain, hero… a son, a brother… a man that died for a cause.

Behind him we see the photographs of Russia adorning the white walls, the only color in the monochrome gallery scene.

The final picture in the series is the most arresting, Mevlut Mert Altintas is facing the camera, gun in one hand with the other pointing skyward to the God he invokes as he shouts jihadist slogans at his terrified audience.

The gunman after shooting the Russian ambassador. Credit Burhan Ozbilici/Associated Press

The ‘terrorists’ we usually encounter in the media are wearing traditional clothes, their face covered in facial hair or wrapped in cloth for anonymity,  AK 47s strapped across their body, standing in concrete bunkers or against barren mountain ranges in undisclosed locations in the Middle East.

Here we see his full face in high resolution and he is unlike the tropes the media feed us. His mouth and forehead contorted with a deathly fury and focus. He proclaims his allegiance to Mohammed and his people, Never forget Aleppo, Never forget Syria and then leaves us with a final eerie curse:

You will never feel safe until they are safe.

I spent hours staring at this picture, staring at his face, absorbing every feature. His eyes ablaze with glory and righteousness also betrayed an anguish and fatigue that we see in all the children of civil wars. At 22 he carries with him a trauma that has been brewing in the middle east for decades.

Most news about the Middle Eastern conflict collects in a corner of my mind, a pile of images and videos of bombings, lives lost, marching refugees, crying children, desert plains and hazy military drone footage.

In the cloudy politics that shadow these events, it’s difficult to wrap your head around their brevity in the unfolding plot before us. But this story in its emulation of a spy thriller felt realer and the danger palpable to someone like me in a bubble thousands of miles away.

The same day of the assassination another attack occurred Berlin, and a week prior in Istanbul a bombing at a soccer stadium killing 38 people. Both just the latest in a long line of attacks that are getting closer and closer to major city centers.

The path of terror used to pluck towns out of obscurity, places that even Lonely Planet would not go, but now I can say that I’ve been to all the places the latest series of attacks have occurred and often within a stone’s throw of where the attack took places.

Shit is getting real.

In this real life war movie we are not the hero or the villain, most of us are the unsuspecting extras wandering around waiting to become collateral damage in explosions that could have been choreographed by Michael Bay.

Our response has been to fight fire with fire believing in our military’s ability to deal out justice. But the fighting continues and a strengthening populist movement is fortifying around the powerful institutions all over the globe. Our safety is at stake, and in order to maintain safety we must sacrifice our freedoms.

The stage is not set for the sequel of how the world plunges forward into a dystopian totalitarian future.

While I may never be the man holding the gun, or the man splayed across the floor I will still play some role. Will I be an extra or get a speaking role in this hyper real movie we all live inside.

GIZZFEST 2016 – Long live the king

After 21 hours on a plane I found myself at Gizzfest, no not Jiz Fest – GIZZ FEST. The Psychadelic rock festival put on by the prolific King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard currently touring around Australia. Never having seen them live or really listened to their music, I was intrigued by what I’d heard. They had been surprising audiences and applauded by critics around the world with their brand of zany, genre defying and humor infused psych rock.

Only in it’s second year this new kid on the block is set to become a fixture on the festival circuit.

Tucked away in Coburg, hoards of long haired youths descended upon the quaint suburb to the velodrome to await their king. It was one of those atypical Melbourne days, mostly overcast and windy yet you manage to get sunburnt without seeing any sunshine.

The Gizz may be weird and whacky, but they have been dubbed one of the hardest working band with the constitution of Protestant Catholics releasing a whopping 8 albums in the short career, with no less than 5 coming in 2017.

Selling out shows around the world they have amassed a cult following of psychedelic hippies reminiscent of the late 60s.

Once fringe territory they have broken into the mainstream after snagging a somewhat controversial ARIA for best hard rock/ metal band and have been riding a wave of success the of their album I’m In Your Mind Fuzz.

Their latest album Nonagon Infinity is a complete loop that can be played from start to finish, back to front and then over and over again burning itself deep into your mind fuzz.

Their next album Flying Microtonal Banana is set to drop February 2017. As per it’s namesake custom guitars and basses were made to make microtonal music, with the band always in pursuit of new sounds.

We know the septet to be ambitious and Gizzfest is their own independent festival dedicated to the flourishing Psych Rock scene in Australia.

Aside from the two headliners, themselves and Pond, the line up was penis heavy with only a couple of female acts – the sisters of Stonefield and up and comer Jaala of Wondercore Island.

While most acts were Australian they had a couple of US exports including White Fence – aka Tim Presley, Mild High Club and in betweener crowd warmers Dinner (who was on at Dinner time) and Boulevards.

The festival goers were the Neo-psychedelic, long hair, tie dye and free love of the 60’s along with some slam dancing.

The dads were also out in force, in their youth they played in bands and been to the bottom of many a mosh pits and had lived to tell the tale. 

It was one of those festivals where the vegetarian food sells out first. A fairly mellow crowd except for when Pond and The Gizz were on stage inciting some serious slam dancing and and crowd surfing.

Most spent the day lazing around the track, finding friends, losing friends, making new ones, lining up for food, lining up for the toilet, sinking cans and discussing when best to drop their drugs.

There were a few early casualties with St Johns dragging away those boozing too hard and a few trippers hanging off trees. But all in all a mellow day in the lead up to the main acts.

We decided to make our way in for Pond and found ourselves in the slam dance circle, trigger happy crowd surfers falling down in every direction. 

Two songs into Pond’s set the band has to ‘cease’ to reinforce the barricades – the crowd was getting a little too lit.

Their set was sadly cut short, but we were ready and reinforced for the King who played a relentless set from the latest album including their new single Rattlesnake.

Right on 10pm it was lights up – the most punctual music festival I’ve ever been too.

Everyone was kicked out to find their way out of Coburg back into the northern suburbs in search of more drink with a few missing shoes, hats, and brain cells.

 

Is Dolores the real villain of Westworld?

Over the last 5 weeks I have steadily sunk deeper and deeper into the mind fuck that is Westworld. Immersing myself in the many subreddits, podcasts and deep dive articles feeding the mania around the show.

We are only half way into the season and the speculation already feels like it’s reaching a fever pitch. The last time I was this deep was posting about the Yellow King on True Detective subreddits. But to be honest this is my favorite part – the theorizing and wild speculation, trying to piece together the puzzle laid before us by Nolan and Joy.

There are several theories circulating now on multiple timelines – which I now believe is defunct but we’ll see, who and what is Arnold, is William or Logan the man in black, the Theseus and the Minotaur maze theory, is the MiB William’s father in law, is Westworld on Earth… and the list goes on.

But one theory I wanted to explore is Dolores, and if she is the ultimate villain in the park we need to watch out for. This idea sparked when a friend said she didn’t like her cause she was evil and I was a little surprised. Personally I had been rooting for Dolores, trapped in a loop to be raped and killed every night so guests can live out their sadistic fantasies. Who wouldn’t want her to be free.

But once the idea took hold is started to make sense.

She can kill

Dolores despite her programming is able to kill living things. The first episode we see her subconsciously kill a fly while the other hosts let them crawl all over their eyeballs.

She can overcome her programming

When Teddy tries to teach her how to shoot she isn’t able to, but when dragged into the barn by Rebus she hallucinates the MiB and figures out how to pull the trigger. As her new gunslinger avatar she is quite the shooter taking out all the Confederados to save William.

She can lie

We know that Dolores knows how to keep a secret and hide information. We see her do this over and over again in her conversations with the Delos technicians, when she is speaking with Bernard and Ford. Most telling when she reports to the voice in her head who we presume to be the omnipresent Arnold ‘I didn’t tell him anything’.

She is also hiding from William her real reason for joining them on their quest, not mentioning the maze or the voices in her head.

She has agency

She is capable of a level of agency that none of the other hosts exhibit. I think, I want, I imagined are all phrases were hear Dolores say as she begins her journey to find the maze. From the conversations we hear of the other hosts none of them are able speak with such self determination.

She is manipulative

As the rancher’s daughter it’s hard for the men of Westworld to resist her charms. Teddy who is programmed to make sure she stays put in her Sweetwater loop has to have his programming reinforced with a more solid back story after we see Dolores trying to convince Teddy they should run away together.

White hat William is falling hard for Dolores, constantly doting on her and trying to preserve some sense of civility in front of Logan’s complete abandon of morals. And we see that Dolores is receptive and is able to use this to her advantage to continue her personal quest for the maze.

She uses this line on both Teddy and William ‘as another old friend used to say, there’s a path for everyone, your path leads you back to me.’ We can only speculate that the old friend is Arnold, and the path she is on will lead back to him.

She was meant to destroy the park

In episode 5 we find out that Dolores was meant to help Arnold destroy the park 35 years ago. She was the last person to see him alive or in his human form.

Ford seems to not wholly trust her and there is a hint of a past relationship between the two years ago as he wells up when she asks him if they were friends.

If she were so dangerous why would he keep her in rotation, surely she should be sent to cold storage like the other malfunctioning androids when they disturb the park’s storyline. Ford knows there is something buried deep in her subconscious and is potentially using her to lure out Arnold’s plot to for salvation.

You could say she was also in part responsible for Maeve’s awakening as she whispers to her ‘these violent delights have violent ends’.

They don’t make them like they used to

In episode 5 we can assume that Dolores is stronger than the other robots in the park being one of the early iterations. From MiB’s comments we learn that Teddy’s generation seem to have been made from human parts because it was cheaper.

Ford gets it

Ford is the only one that seems to recognize how dangerous these robots are and is constantly reminding his staff they are just machines, in one scene we see him reprimanding one of the sculptors for covering up the robots as he works on them.

He also reminds Bernard not to make the same mistake as Arnold who saw himself as a self proclaimed savior for the hosts.

The will to survive

We should not underestimate her will to survive. Drawing a parallel to Ex Machina – which if you haven’t seen stop reading now – where we are all rooting for Ava and Caleb to escape Nathan’s research prison and it seems that AI is capable of love and empathy. Instead Ava kills Nathan and leaves Caleb to die in order to preserve her own chance at life.

There is even a scene when Nathan tells Caleb how Ava’s real test is escape, and she must use all the capabilities she possesses, including sexuality, to find a way out. Dolores’s maze similarly represents her own Turing test of sentience and she must use every part of her programming, even those she is not yet aware of, in order to pass.

Based on what we have seen of Dolores, deep beneath her southern bell rancher’s daughter programming could be the ultimate weapon and the downfall of the park.

But while Dolores may be an apocalyptic catalyst for the park, that does not make her any less deserving of freedom. The same way that we can’t really fault Ava for going after a dream that has been implanted in her.

We’ll see how our villain/heroine continues to unravel on Sunday night.

The Spice Cabinet

I’m one of those people with a very mild case of obsessive compulsive disorder. You know, those people who lock their door three time, that choose to eat the same thing everyday for months, are chronic list makers. People for whom routines and order represent comfort rather than boredom, driven by this overwhelming desire to bring coherence to the chaos around us.

OCD can be extremely prohibitive to one’s lifestyle, my mild case of obsessive compulsive /anal retentiveness however still allows me to function in everyday life albeit with a few strange behaviors.

This post chronicles the seemingly ludicrous lengths we will go to satisfy these tendencies we harbor for organization and structure.

 

The Spice Cabinet

To set the scene. It’s Saturday mid morning with the clock inching towards lunch time. There I was with nothing to do, not yet hungry, and done with my errands for the day.

Perusing our food stocks to prep for lunch I caught site of the bomb site our spice cupboard had become.

There was spice residue everywhere, creating a malodorous spice concoction that had been brewing in our months of neglect – cinnamon mingled with garam masala, thyme and Colombo spice plus many more my spidey senses could not quite discern.

Staring at the pungent mess I was compelled to bring order to this disarray.

I turned to my trusty organizational tool – the Google Sheet. An obsessive compulsive’s best friend, there isn’t much a poorly formatted Google Sheet can’t solve.

Removing, cleaning, consolidating and cataloguing our spice collection revealed a flavor map of our eating habits.

There were several jars of the usual suspects, coriander, cumin, turmeric. Our turmeric supply perpetually low being a chronic indian and putting into everything including open wounds as I grew up with my grandma assuring me of its Ayurvedic antiseptic properties.

I discovered long forgotten flavors I had bought over the years in various culinary exploits. The Jamaican Jerk powder, the star anise powder and a lifetime supply of cloves given that each recipe usually only calls for 2 – 3.

In total our household had amassed 42 unique spices touching cuisines from around the world.

Once I had returned order to the spice shelf I turned my attention to the other pantry items and proceeded to sort through our dry goods and sauces. 3 bottles of fish sauce, 2 sticky bottles of sauce, 2 packs of quinoa and couscous and the list goes on.

2 hours later I was back in the kitchen crafting a moroccan – asian fusion dish inspired by the new finds.

In a few weeks from now my Google Sheet will be out of date and the order I had restored will again collapse into a food storage calamity, but for those few weeks I’ll bask in the peace of mind an anal retentive like me gets from these simple pleasures in life.

Survival of the fittest: Spectacles vs Glass 😎 🤓

A couple of weeks ago Snapchat made two big announcements. First, they were changing the company name from Snapchat to Snap Inc to reflect the new company direction. Second, they announced the launch of their first hardware product – Spectacles.

Many of us will remember a previous iteration of this product, Google Glass. It emerged April 2013, went public a year later in 2014, and became extinct in 2015. While you may encounter a rare surviving specimen on eBay, all manufacturing has since stopped.

A year and a half later, the harbinger to the next phase of wearable tech has arrived. The company FKA Snapchat, who have proven to be extremely good at making things cool kids love, plan to release their Spectacles into the wild this Fall.

Claiming it to be the world’s smallest wireless camera with enough battery life for a full day of snaps, that seamlessly uploads video to the app, what makes this new species of wearable tech fit for today’s environment compared to it’s fallen predecessor?

Aesthetics

Even with the help of Warby Parker and no doubt many other talented designers, Google Glass was an esoteric piece of cyborg fashion for a post apocalyptic future. Despite the diverse people it included in it’s marketing collateral, the vast majority of wearers were nerdy white tech guys.

Spectacles are the antithesis of Google Glass, you could go so far as to say they were designed to look ridiculous on a nerdy white tech guy.

They do look good on Snap Inc CEO Evan Speigel, who with his super model fiancee and 22 billion dollar company is one of the cooler white tech guys.

Despite their namesake Spectacles are sunglasses, already making them inherently cooler. Aesthetically they borrow from a style made popular by Ray Bans, an established style icon amongst young and slightly older generations.

The press shots are styled like a high fashion shoot, bold, bright, worn by beautiful models. The shots of CEO Even Speigel sporting a pair were shot by high fashion king Karl Lagerfeld himself.

$$$$$$$

The Spectacle will retail for $130 USD, the same as a pair of Ray Bans. So if you’re planning to drop cash on a pair of sunglasses you may as well get a pair that have a build in wireless camera.

The $130 price range also makes it ideal for gifting, and will no doubt be a popular choice for parents, aunts and uncles this holiday season.

Google Glass launched its explorer edition at $1,500, a price tag that covered much than  a wireless camera, but given that that was it’s most marketed and sort after feature, $1,500 it was less easy to swallow.

 

Target Market

From the price point and marketing collateral, it’s pretty clear who Spectacles are made for. The 150 million SnapChat users aged between 13 – 34 in mainly the US and Europe. Snap Inc already knows that these chronic photographers and videographers use a camera every day to create and share content. Spectacles is a wireless tool to extend this existing user behavior.

Google started selling a prototype of Google Glass to a group of beta testers they called “Glass Explorers” before making it available to the public.

These explorers were people of extraordinary skills that found themselves in extraordinary situations like flying planes, skydiving, doing aerial tricks on trapezes, horse jumping and snowboarding. While yes some of us do get to experience these things, most of us can’t relate to the lifestyle the device corresponded to.

The Spectacles promo video shows a group of teenage girls skating around sunny LA for a day. An experience a larger group of people can relate too.

Google Glass Marketing Video

Spectacles Marketing Video

Circles vs Squares 

The move away from rectangular/ square videos, which Evan describes an archaic legacy of the old photo world, is a defining feature. The 115 degree lenses make videos feel more first person and circular video output makes the video accessible to both portrait or landscape viewer preferences.

Toy vs Utility

Speigel himself describes Spectacles as a toy – something to be worn at parties, events and holidays. Not a serious utility device like a phone.

You could describe most of SnapChat’s product features as toys, a perfect example being the multitude of face filters you can play dress ups with.

By staying within the boundary of play rather than utility people are alleviated of the need to justify their purchase as much.

Google Glass was also a toy in a sense but an extremely expensive one, and marketed at people that led these extraordinary professional roles.

Google as a company makes products to help you get things done and the Glas was also billed as a productivity tool that accepted voice commands and stack of information features strapped to your face.

Social Norms

When Google Glass first came out, there was a tide of privacy concerns over people being filmed unknowingly. There were also many venues that banned glass for this reason too. While these concerns were not solely responsible for the products downfall, they were part responsible for helping create the stigma around it.

We are yet to see if these same concerns will plague Spectacles. To address this stigma Spectacles light up to indicate when someone is recording and videos can only be 10 seconds long.

The Spectacles in the first of many products Snap Inc is believed to launch as it’s new incarnation as a hardware company.

The first and only line on their website home page is:

Snap Inc. is a camera company.

We believe that reinventing the camera represents our greatest opportunity to improve the way people live and communicate.

After Instagram stole Stories some of us thought the end was near for SnapChat, but pivoting into an new product innovation track will no doubt secure their survival in the fiercely competitive tech company market, amongst the incumbents like Facebook, Google and Apple.

 

Keep trollin’ trollin’ trollin’ trollin’ 👹👺👹👺👹👺

Twitter is back in the limelight again after the recent troll attacks on comedian Leslie Jones and Olympian Gaby Douglass. Harambe, whose ghost has reincarnated as an internet meme continues to torment Cincinnati zoo, who deactivated their twitter account last week.

Twitter banned several of the instigators in the Leslie Jones incident, but the platform has been under pressure to do more to protect users from trolls.

In response they rolled out two new features; an updated verification process and the quality filter.

Users can now submit requests to get a verified account, a status reserved for accounts of public interest. While verification only really benefits the super famous or accounts that attract imposters, verified users were also the first to receive access to the quality feature which removed offensive tweets from your feed.

After criticism that not just the Twitterati should have access to this privilege, it has since been rolled out to all Twitter users.

From Twitter’s blog post on the quality filter, ‘Turning it on filters lower-quality content, like duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated, from your notifications and other parts of your Twitter experience. It does not filter content from people you follow or accounts you’ve recently interacted with – and depending on your preferences, you can turn it on or off in your notifications settings.’

This is similar to Instagram’s initiatives, who released a comment moderation tool to high profile accounts like Chrissy Teigen’s. Here she can enter in keywords that can be used to filter out offensive comments.

While these efforts are effective in hiding troller’s tweets and comments from the people they target, they do little to prevent the act of trolling itself.

Twitter has become a quasi-public space for people to freely express themselves, but Twitter is a technology company and aside from expanding it’s moderation, it is not ethically equipped to be responsible for policing this space.

In a Op ed piece for Turning Points magazine Eric Schmidt wrote:

This is where our own relationship with the Internet, and with technology, must be examined more closely. The Internet is not just a series of tubes transmitting information from place to place, terminal to terminal, without regard for those typing on their keyboards or reading on their screens. The people who use any technology are the ones who need to define its role in society. Technology doesn’t work on its own, after all. It’s just a tool. We are the ones who harness its power.

This social behavior that makes thousands of people willing participants in troll attacks is buried deep in our human psyche, and all internet citizens are part of building a respectful culture of connectedness online.

Anything for the lulz

A good place to start is why user’s troll. Many have sited ‘lulz’ as their main motivation. While it shares it’s etymology with lol – it is a more sinister form of humor that seeks laughs at the expense of someone’s misfortune. Used in a sentence:

User: Why post a giant image of 50 Hitlers?

Troll: I did it for the lulz

Studies found that the typical trolls possessed traits of psychopathy, narcissism, and sadism. They find enjoyment in the distress of others – aka lulz. Each response or retweet feeds their ego and sense of power. The bigger the news story, the better.

Interestingly when trollers are not protected by the internet’s cloak of anonymity they are able to keep their troll nature in check. But the lack of any punitive consequences makes it to easy to indulge their inner troll online.

They say the best thing to do with trolls is ignore them, but that is neither fair nor easy to do.

Consequences, Schmonsequences

Today in the US there is a loose legal framework around cyberbullying and harassment online. But as trolling can be protected under the First Amendment, so the greatest disciplinary tools we have is suspension from Twitter.

This is frustrating to the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos who was suspended over inciting some of the Leslie Jones attack. But compared to any real world punishment for harassment you could say it’s a pretty light sentence.

In the UK and Australia tweets are taken more seriously, where people can face jail time as it is an offense to send a threatening, offensive or indecent letter, electronic communication or article with the intent to cause distress or anxiety.

Even with a legal framework in place the difficulty comes in a identifying people.

Movements towards verification are good but can also be dangerous, especially in political climates where tweets against the government or powerful corporations can have dangerous consequences for people using the platform as a protest tool.

Greater censorship is an option but then we wade into the muddy ethics of who gets the right to censor another voice. Unlike a publication that has an editorial point of view, twitter is opinion agnostic.

Learning how to use Social Media

Writing, the greatest technology created by man, is much like the internet in that it acts as the medium for any type of message.  

The alphabet and words themselves are harmless, but when strung together for diabolical purposes it is deadly.

One of the most dangerous weapons of our time is the technology to communicate and mobilize people towards a cause. 

Most of our childhood is spent learning how to read and write. Our writing is reviewed and critiqued by our parents, teachers and friends to ensure we enter adulthood with a strong grasp on how to use that language.

The difference with the internet is that for a long time there were no teachers – we unleashed a mass of people and untapped energy and emotion which manifested itself in different ways. Now as the first generation of native internet user’s get older we can bring more guidance about how to use the Internet.

More and more schools now include curriculum on how to participate in online forums and social media, and how to deal with cyber harassment and bullying.

We need to educate people on how to use social media in respectful ways. Whilst the internet and especially public platforms like twitter provide the ideal conditions for trolling  – how do we get people to respect the social contract that they uphold in real life.

Larry Page and Jack Dorsey will continue to find ingenious ways to employ technology to prevent trolling, but like the saying goes it takes a village to raise a child, it takes government, technology companies and all internet citizens to build a safer web that supports diversity.

Redesigning mass produced meat 🐷 🐮 🐔

They say that the most effective design is invisible. Design that blends so seamlessly into the fabric of our daily life, we don’t realize that someone, someday, somewhere was thinking about the specifics of creating that moment.

There are many designed systems that mediate our experiences that we are completely unaware of like language, city planning, religions. There are also the many social trends and behaviors guiding our lives that we take for normal, when in fact normal itself is a construct.

This is where I would place meat and the culture we have built around it. All our collective conceptions and behaviors around meat have been developing since before the documented history of humans.

There is not doubt meat is a highly nutritious source of food for us, but the meat we know today is a far cry from the meat people used to eat hundreds, even thousands of year ago.

What you see on the supermarket shelves is anything but natural. The product that ends up on our plates is is the byproduct of unnatural processes that not only affect our health, but the health of the entire planet. Yet we still see the consumption of modern day meat as a natural part of human life.

I turned vegetarian 6 years ago after working on the World Society for the Protection of Animals. There I learnt the horrors of animal farming watching countless videos and images that are now burned into my brain.

Most people don’t encounter this information in their daily life and if given the choice would remain ignorant, and I don’t blame them.

Don’t worry this post does not include any graphic links and videos because while it may have helped change my habits – for most people it’s ineffective.

Building empathy for something is very hard when that thing is not related to you, doesn’t resemble you, and is never in direct contact with you. A video of pig farming can easily be forgotten when you’re sitting down for a mouthwatering dinner at Fette Sau.

Donating to charities that spend millions on creating elaborate campaigns with celebrity endorsements can only take you so far, at the end of the day these are marketing efforts. To see widespread change we need to relook at the design of the product itself.

Mass produced meat, the output of factory farming, has been designed to be extremely appealing to our senses, lifestyle and wallet. Over time it has come to take the shape it does today in order to ship more product.

It works hard to completely distance itself from the animal and environment from where it came from. The industry have been so effective at this that most of us remember that moment when as children we learned that the animals at the petting zoo are the same ones on the table.

But good meat does still exist today. By good meat I mean meat that is not produced with the use of antibiotics or hormones. Good meat comes from farms that maintain animal husbandry practices and ethical treatment of animals from birth to killing. These farms are also conscientious of their footprint and run sustainable operations.

The problem is that it’s fairly unaccessible to most people, and most people don’t care.

But do people need to be subjected to PETA style propaganda to change, or can basic product changes help people make informed choices about what they are eating?

This is the challenge I would like to put out to Product Designer or really all designers everywhere. Redesign what meat means to the everyday consumer to help build a healthier culture around consuming it.

So here’s the brief:

Project Scope/Overview:

Starting from a sustainable and ethical source redesign what meat is today. Focus on the actual meat product itself – the plastic wrapped flesh that fill supermarket fridges around the world.

Every aspect of the ‘meat product’ is open to change from the packaging, the name, even the cut itself.

However you feel the concept of meat manifests itself and needs to be redesigned – for example overhaul the meal paradigm of ‘meat and three veg’ that have dominated kitchens for decades.

Objective:

Change people’s attitudes and eating behaviors towards meat by communicating the interconnectedness between the meat that we eat and impact on animals, humans and the planet ecosystem.

The intention is not to turn people in the vegetarians/ vegans – although that wouldn’t be terrible if it happened. The intended goal is to get people to reach for a better product in the supermarket shelf. To be willing to pay more for high quality, cruelty free meat and forge new eating habits that reduce consumption.

Target User:

Our target user is all people that eat mass produced meat today. These people will have varying degrees of nutritional education and will also have varying degrees of buying power.

Consider the solution for the lowest common denominator for the greatest impact.

Distribution:

Our product will sit alongside all other cheaper low quality meat products under the fluorescent lights in supermarkets, not at Wholefoods or artisan grocers and butchers.

Key Features/Benefits:

They value we need to communicate is:

• Good meat is better for you and your family
• Good meat does not need to be consumed every day at every meal
• Good meat is better for the animals raised
• Good meat drives money to local and smaller farmers
• Good meat is better for the planet

 

Design Language:

The language we use to describe meat now allows us to easily disassociate it from a living creature. Listed below are common names for meat in English none of them relate to the actual animal they are from:

• Meat balls
• Hamburger
• Boston Butt
• Porterhouse Steak
• Fillet Mignon
• Flat Iron Steak
• Hanger Steak
• Bacon
• Ham
• Swiss Steak
• Sirloin
• Pancetta
• Prosciutto

We need to create a new language around meat that helps balance empathy with selling a product.

Avoid loaded words like organic and free range. When these words first emerged we were eager to believe that we were making informed buying choices but given the lack or regulations around organic and ethical farming practices these words actually mean very little and if anything actually hinder our cause due to their connotations with over priced and expensive food.

Competition:

Our competition is enormous and comes in all forms:

• Competing products
• Restaurants are geared towards meat eating culture
• Holidays centered around meat based meals
• The meat industry itself that measure’s success by profits rather than people’s health, or ethical and sustainability standards.

The fact is we love eating meat, it’s delicious! Most big national holidays feature a meat centerpiece, whether it be a Turkey, Chicken, Duck or Pig.

How do we leverage our love of meat as a society to support ethical and sustainable meat products.