Oh please! Not the robots again

We’ve heard this kind of thing before. If you’re like me, you are tired of hearing the same old song since the early 1980s, when the car industry became robotized. Hollywood received good material for apocalyptical movies. But we cannot take these dystopian future predictions seriously while we watch our robot vacuum cleaners struggle with maneuvering around a couple of chairs. When will these household robots evolve into superintelligent killing machines? The question is worth asking after seeing twenty-first-century hi-tech armies being challenged by poorly educated men with Kalashnikovs in their hands.

Schadenfreude and the rise of the machines

While we waited for the robot revolution, we had fun at the beginning of this century by watching YouTube videos of the ASIMO robot’s mishaps. It seems that robotic research has caused more entertainment than admiration. We smile when the mighty suffer in popular entertainment. Watching robots fail is now the epic enjoyable sport for working classes, just as watching VCR tapes was in the previous century.

Robot missteps in production lines reassure us that the robots will not jeopardize our future. Or will they? The robots may be out to prove themselves with the new Atlas. Unveiled earlier this year by Boston Dynamics, the Atlas shocked many, including the company owner, Google. Boston Dynamics gained cult popularity and brought robots into the fourth dimension with their previous robotic dogs, changing the face of modern robots forever. Those dogs were a lifetime away from ASIMO, but the Atlas is closer to what people fear about intelligent machines. It didn’t take long for Google to realize that Boston Dynamics had little appeal in public opinion. Thus, fearing a new Google Glass, they announced they’re putting Boston Dynamics up for sale.

The robots are out there, in disguise

You probably wouldn’t be able to tell from a quick look outside, but robots are silently and rapidly becoming part of our streets’ inventory; they’re simply disguised as something else. For instance, take Copenhagen Metro. Copenhagen, known for its low-tech transport (50% of people commute by bike), was the first city in the world to have a fully automatized, state-of-the-art network back in 2008. Computers and hi-tech robotic trains deliver 89.9% accuracy and no accidents, with trains running up to 80 kilometers per hour less than 60 seconds from each other. By the time you read this, a robot will be driving below my window every minute.

Computers and robots are taking to the streets. Even my basic VW Up has a computer that can think faster than I can and thus take over in dangerous situations. (My wife argues, however, that outthinking me doesn’t require advanced software.) The list is long and sometimes secretive. For example, every minute, computers help planes land without the passengers’ knowledge. Imagine the panic that would ensue in the cabin if the captain were to announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, because of terrible visibility conditions, we have decided to let the plane land by itself.”

And we still laugh at the bots

Just as we had fun at the expense of the ASIMO robot, my children laugh at Siri. The clumsiness of the AI and some bots still provides the same kind of entertainment. Marketing professionals and creative directors in the advertising industry still distrust the technology. But the scale of the automatization project is evident. We must acknowledge that automatization is no longer a blue-collar issue and goes far beyond the production line and into marketing, customer service, journalism, business consulting, and law firm associates. Robots even write corporate earnings reports for the Associated Press. Sooner or later, your work will not resemble what it is now.

Many of the smartest people in the industry agree that computer capacity is no longer a problem. Instead, the issue is to find the right design to create services that learn from their own mistakes and will change our lives definitely.

Alexa is the next step in the quest to fill our home with bots. Amazon Echo might have changed my perspective on the bots. After all, it’s the closest thing to a 24/7 shopping assistant sitting in my living room, and it includes more than 100 services, from Nest to Uber. This this is the real deal coming from Amazon, who took in 39.3% of online holiday e-commerce spending in the United States last year. Google want to be there and has just presented their own Google Home assistant this week.

You can still laugh at the robots. The future may not yet be now, but it is getting closer.

Pictures: Minority Report. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 2002. Terminator Salvation, Warner Home Video, 2009. Copenhagen Metro by flo-klee in Creative Commons. Amazon Eco by Amazon.

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Mad Men allows us to enjoy smarter quotes than what we hear at the office, memorable situations, and a ruthlessly competitive world. Personally, I have experienced similar events in the advertising, fashion, and now digital media businesses.

If this isn’t enough, the show lets you fill your senses with the most outstanding production design and costume design. The show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, production designer Dan Bishop, set decorator Claudette Didul and costume designer Janie Bryant have conceived one of the most immersive and accurate depiction of Mid-Century culture to date, making it a global phenomenon in the fashion and design industries. I saw myself while working in fashion business when the show first launched, and I recalled how everyone converted overnight to this Mid-Century Modern visual universe. Endless conversations at the photo shoot analyzed every single detail in the series, especially Bryant’s work.

What if we decided to find the real locations of our favorite characters? If we could pretend to match the production work of the team, there would be no other alternative than picking the finest architects of mid-century America, those who inspired the show. The settings’ real locations fit the characters’ hard-edged lives.  Let me hear if we have chosen as you expected. Enjoy.

Betty Draper and the Kauffmann house by Richard Neutra

Few residences can compare to the timeless elegance of the Kauffmann house, but it is second to none to Betty Draper. Ambitious and representative, this Palm Springs residence was commissioned by Edgar Kaufmann, the Pittsburgh department store magnate, who ordered houses from the best architects in the world the way you and I order cups of coffee.

Roger Sterling and the Stahl house

Once upon a time, most elegant people threw parties the Sterling way, as he said, because men in his generation “deserved it.” So, this confident, womanizing, and moody guy deserves and lavish backdrop to his escapades and the days after. Designed to impress as you enter the Case Study House #22, this structure gives you the material to reflect about life for this guy, who is unable to be happy for too long, during the afternoons while watching the view with a scotch in hand.

Don Draper and the Miller Residence by Eero Saarinen

It is a great challenge to move Don from the best apartment set in TV history, but a good Finnish architect can help with the task. A conversation pit and gorgeous interiors do the rest. This residence is considered one of Saarinen’s finest.

Peggy Olson and The eames Residence

No creative in this world would mind moving into the Eames home in Palisades, and no woman is afraid of experimenting by mixing plastic chairs with African masks and Japanese origami. All framed in hi-tech steel and glass construction. most creatives today still dream of such a home. Surprisingly, only a few of the most well-off dare to build something similar.

Bertram Cooper and the Case Study House #16

Cooper loves Japan, and so he needed to pick the perfect house in which to go barefoot. There were hundreds of gorgeous homes to pick from, because Japan has been hot ever since, and the best American architects on the west coast looked across the Pacific for inspiration during the mid-century period. The best choice was Craig Ellwood’s Case Study House #16. With its great volume distribution and semi transparent screens, it is one of the finest houses of the 20th century and the closest you could come to Nagano at that time.

Joan Holloway and the Recreation Pavillion at the Mirman House

Dealing with your mother and your son at home is much easier in the right location. The architects Buff, Straub and Hensman stand behind the recreation pavilion for the Mirman residence and proved that having children at home does not mean turning your house into a mini Disneyland and saying goodbye to your former taste.

Credits:

Stalh house by Ryan Ward. Eames House: Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times Julius Shulman: Mirman House and Case Study House #21. Mad Men charcters by ACM.

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The title hit the top of Amazon’s list of best-selling science-fiction titles, attracting the interest of the publisher that rejected it a few months before. The print version came to life and immediately hit the New York Times’ bestseller list. Now the story is an Oscar-nominated movie.

The timing of the novel could not be better, with everyone wondering about water on Mars and the possibility of putting a man on another planet for the first time, but Mars is not only a plan for the future. It is every day now, because we tend to forget that we have a car-sized rover driving around the slopes of Mount Sharp on the red planet. The guys from JPL made possible one of the most sophisticated landings of a probe ever, and the rover has been around for more than 1221 Sols.

Long gone are the days of the Pathfinder, a vacuum cleaner-sized rover delivering blurry red pictures. We now enjoy a first-class laboratory on wheels that is also delivering some of the most outstanding imagery we have seen from an alien world. This is not Utah or Morocco, it is more than 5 millions kilometers away, and it is spectacular!

Pictures by National Aeronautics and Space Administration/JPL

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Believe me, thanks to this title your 21st century had a very different outcome.

Look around you —your sleek smartphone, your wardrobe, your living room decor, the foodies delicatessen in your fridge, or your last travel destination. Wallpaper* was one of the main players promoting obscure trends that are becoming mainstream today you can find Wallpaper* magazine’s influence even in your grandmother’s favorite Sunday newspaper.

It all started one day when Tyler Brûlé secured a loan and launched the astonishingly beautiful Wallpaper* magazine in 1996. This fresh title presented an alternative lifestyle to the grunge culture and marked a new direction in the difficult art of magazine publishing.

The sales figures skyrocketed in the first months of publication and attracted the attention of the publishing industry. In an unprecedented move Time Inc. offered one million pounds for a young title only a few months old and kept all the existing staff in place. Backed by one of the biggest media concerns in the world, Tyler Brûlé made Wallpaper* one of the most influential global magazines in recent decades, moving the grunge generation X (the ungroomed pre-sequel of the hipsters) to places where they had never been.

Today Wallpaper* magazine is a cliché of itself. Brûlé and his staff are long gone and started Monocle Magazine, but their influence in our lives remains. See how:

Tyler Brûlé & Wallpaper* Made It Cool to Look Healthy

I bought my first issue a few months after launch. The smiling Ivy League guys definitely stood out at a newsstand crowded with grunge and late 90s heroin looks. Depicting sports and health in a fashion title was a suicidal stunt that represented the worst of the 80s. Today, health is all around asking about half-marathon results is a great icebreaker at social gatherings.

Tyler Brûlé & Wallpaper* Made You Love Mad Men 10 Years before Mad Men Aired

Back in 1996 the 50s design associated with the worst of western culture. So, promoting the very best of mid-century modern architecture and interior design in a fashion magazine was a wrong staff decision. But against all odds, Wallpaper* succeeded with what no other architectural magazine had ever achieved—making the new generations love 20th century classic architectural masterpieces, sometimes as a mere first class background for high-end fashion shoots. You had never seen so much concrete in a magazine before.

Tyler Brûlé & Wallpaper* Made Us Desire an iPhone 10 Years Before the iPhone Arrived

Electronic devices in the late 90s were mostly disposable gadgets in plastic or computers in cream plastic or meter tall black Sony hi-fi systems. Wallpaper* contributed to a shift in tastes, promoting the work of designers like Jacob Jensen for Bang and Olufsen and Dieter Rams for Braun, opening our eyes to finish in aluminum and the long-forgotten design quality of home devices. Jonathan Ive and his team at Apple created the products you were longing for during the decade that followed.

Tyler Brûlé & Wallpaper* Made You Upgrade Your Wardrobe

In a time when a plastic watches set you on the edge of over-accessorizing, promoting Swiss watches and end-fashion to the broad public was a no-go strategy. Wallpaper* taught us to drop the white t-shirts and flannel shirts and love the relaunched Gucci from a new guy called Tom Ford. Hugo Boss, Filippa K, Burberry, and FCUK followed afterward. Generation X experienced a sense of quality they’d never tasted before.

Tyler Brûlé & Wallpaper* Made Us Love Scandi Once Again

After the heyday of the Scandinavian design in the 50s and 60s the Scandinavian culture lost much of its international appeal. Wallpaper* articles about Wegner, Alto, and Asplund contributed to the renaissance we enjoy today where many admire our balance of craftsmanship, high tech, sustainability, and social equality. New and cool Scandi designers were included on top of the classics. Habitat, IKEA, and the Nordic Noir did the rest.

Tyler Brûlé & Wallpaper* Designed Many of the Magazines You’re Reading Today

A balanced mix of fashion, travel, food, and architecture have become the ubiquitous standard ingredients of the publishing business today, from high-end magazines to Sunday issues of tabloid newspapers. Back in the 90s the media landscape was dominated by narrow-casted magazines covering mainly one issue. Titles like Wallpaper* or Arena shook the business, breaking the rules and establishing themselves as major actors in the last golden age of the print business before the advent of the digital media.

Tyler Brûlé & Wallpaper* Taught You to be Truly Global

The usual suspects (Paris, London, Rome, and New York) attracted millions of visitors during decades of cultural monopoly. No one dared to move off the beaten path. So Wallpaper* raised eyebrows when featuring travel guides for Santiago, Manchester, Tel Aviv, and even Baghdad. The guides, with the superior quality of their scouting appreciated even by the locals, have been the standard for the industry ever since and have been imitated endless times since.

Tyler Brûlé & Wallpaper* Filled Your Fridge with Ecology

The 80s gave us nothing more than broccoli and over-hyped French cuisine. The 90s failed even worse and gave us the popularization of fast food. The landscape was depressing, as Naomi Klein pointed at that time.

Health and sustainability were not directly linked to modern urban living. Despite that it has been around since the 70s, the ecology movement never took off. Wallpaper* contributed to changing that and promoting food sustainability to new consumers, adding an unexpected coolness to local, organic products.

Featuring food was a huge, bold move coming from a fashion magazine. The staff proved to be ahead of their time. Anticipating that food was fast-becoming a key factor in urban lifestyles Wallpaper* challenged our tastes, supporting the emerging new food trends we enjoy today.

Tyler Brûlé & Wallpaper* Illustrated Your Dreams

Never before had a lifestyle magazine offered so much place to illustrators. Wallpaper* shocked many in the business by resurrecting fashion illustration from the grave. The entire media industry copied the concept and a renaissance of modern illustration was born.

Pictures from the few magazines that survived five house movings. Cover picture by Monocle.

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