Beauty behind the Veil. Saudi women spent almost SR9bn (£1.6bn) on cosmetics last year, among the highest per capita spend in the world. Analysts forecast that the market will grow by 11 percent this year.

Half a Billion Faces. Facebook reaches 500 million users. It is now the biggest social network in every country except Russia, Japan and China.

The eBook Era. Amazon has sold 143 digital books for its e-reader, the Kindle, for every 100 hardback books over the past three months. The pace of change is also accelerating. Amazon said that in the most recent four weeks, the rate reached 180 ebooks for every 100 hardbacks sold.

‘By 2020, nobody shall be seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo.’

It sounds fantastical but — according to Volvo — it’s true. According to the Volvo site:

‘This statement from 2008 clearly formulates a long-term vision to create cars that will not crash. Volvo Cars’ strategy to achieve Vision 2020 includes cooperating with social partners, integrating preventative and protective safety systems into the car and, in particular, to better understands people in traffic situations. Driver behaviour is a contributing factor in over 90 percent of all accidents.

“The goal is unique in that Volvo Cars has designated a year and is showing a social responsibility that also extends to people in other vehicles and pedestrians,” says Anders Eugensson, safety expert at Volvo Cars. ”We are very clear about the fact that our cars should not negatively affect other people at the moment of an accident. In addition, no unprotected roadusers should be seriously injured or killed.”

Whilst other car companies have also hit on the potential of future tech for safety, no one brand has been so bold as to turn it into a PR-able brand story. Which is what Vision 2020 is. And — vitally — it’s entirely credible.

According to Ed Kim, an analyst at automotive research firm AutoPacific, the zero-fatality goal is achievable. Within the next ten years, the confluence of safety technologies such as road sign recognition, pedestrian detection and autonomous car controls will produce far safer cars. Vision 2020 is a Utopian vision which suggests that the auto wreck – that horror symbol of the 20th Century – could be consigned to the past. A vision that Volvo now has the potential to own.

Story stolen with glee from Slashdot.

Image: Car Crash by Andy Warhol.

The New Media Age awards aim ‘to provide a benchmark of excellence from which the industry can learn and build’ and are awarded to websites and other interactive propositions in recognition of creativity, innovation and experimentation in delivering genuine business benefits and real value to the consumer.

Vtravelled won because the judges found the site ‘really engaging’ and that it ‘resonated with the target audience’. In short, it does everything a brand community site should do. Since launch, the site has seen a 64% increase in membership and revenues have increased 20% over the last six months.

ATTIK Leeds helped design and launch the site last year and we’re delighted that it has been recognised in this way.

Fashion designers are increasingly seeking new, innovative – and more cost effective – ways to display their collections. The growth of online has also meant that catwalk shows are no longer just for the privileged few. The cost and effort is increasingly being redirected into experimentation, and in particular, into formats that can proliferate online. For instance, numerous pret-a-porter designers have experimented with online video, with Prada and Halston producing some particularly inventive short films for their brands. Others – such as Dutch designers Viktor and Rolf have gone even further, producing online-only fashion shows.

Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy has just dialled such accessibilty right back, producing a static couture collection that was physically viewable only to a select few. Tisci’s notion was to re-elevate couture, to take it back to its roots as craft, spectacle and art .. and tactility. Tisci says of the collection:

‘It is a celebration of craftsmanship, which you must see and feel and touch. The women in the Givenchy atelier are like engineers, finding solutions to impossible things, and bringing my dreams and fantasies to life. This is the most ‘couture’ couture I have ever done.’

Tisci’s decision to exhibit just ten pieces is indicative of the new luxury movement towards focus, but emphatically not compromise. After all, each of the pieces shown is worth thousands of euros.

East meets Luxe. Chinese tourists rapidly becoming the most lucrative market for Japanese retailers.

Welcome to the Senior Web. Nearly two million more Britons have come online during the last year, over half of which are over 50.

Commodity Crunch. Food prices to rise 40% over the next decade.

ATTIK London‘s production manager, Shane Tattersall, is currently starring on-pack in South Africa.

Swatch is a great brand: iconic, meaningful and with a long heritage. But like many brands on the fashion/youth axis, it suffers a relevancy problem. And like that other iconic youth brand Dr Martens, Swatch experiences peaks and troughs in fashion but its design – in essence – has remained consistent. It’s sad, then, that it rarely get the kind of advertising it deserves. Case in point: the above ‘badvertising’ spotted in Hoxton (where else?), which also seems to have no relationship with the current advertorial running in the style press (and which we actually quite like).

Not only does this kind of execution belittle the design of the brand, it doesn’t communicate anything other than a URL. It’s also badvertising in that it’s a pollutant, bringing the brand into disrepute. There’s also nothing *fun* or inspiring about it – something as intrinsic to the brand as great design. Compare and contrast with this Swatch box from the 80s – Point Of Sale that does its job brilliantly. Why not bring that design ethos to the ads?

Note: Swatch’s founder, Nicolas Hayek, sadly died recently, sparking a number of articles eulogising both him and his company. This one from the Telegraph is particularly informative, not least due to the fab photograph of him with a Swatch wall clock.

Our Coke World Cup VIS – designed in Leeds – is now plastered all over a billboard near you. Come on England!

Mobile-TV nation: In South Korea, 27 million people — 56 percent of the population — watch free-to-air mobile TV regularly.

Farewell to youth: The UK youth market is set to diminish over coming years. By 2017 there will be 4.9m teenagers in Britain, down 9 per cent from 5.4m today, according to analysis by the Financial Times of projections from the Office for National Statistics. The numbers of young people aged 15-24 are set to drop by 5 per cent in the next five years.

Android rising: Global sales of smartphones using Google’s Android operating system have overtaken Microsoft’s Windows mobile phones for the first time. Android phone sales have also overtaken Apple’s iPhone in the North American market, accounting for 26.6 per cent of units sold, compared with 22.1 per cent for the iPhone.

ATTIK are featured in Fast Company magazine again this month. James Sommerville is interviewed in an article looking at the design around the FIFA World Cup Trophy Tour, which travels 151,217 kilometers, over 225 days, across five continents and is seen by at least half a million people.

In the article, James explains a bit more about ATTIK’s VIS for Coca-Cola‘s sponsorship of the football tournament.

‘The symbols are unique: the vuvuzelas (the popular long, trumpet-like instruments), the peace symbols, and the mouths representing singing … While the game is on the field, there’s an enormous amount of patter in the stands. The atmosphere is loud, vibrant. Most people aren’t even watching the game, they’re just having fun. The visual identity language was created to capture of the joy of every fan’s ‘inner African.”

ENVISION : Step into the sensory box from SUPERBIEN on Vimeo.

We’re expecting great things from projection technology over the next few months – both large and small scale – as the technology becomes more accessible (and hackable). French agency Superbien are already pushing at the boundaries of what can be done with this projection mapping project.

Via Rambunktion.

The legendary information design theorist (and advisor to the Obama administration) is in London to promote his latest tome, Beautiful Evidence. We were lucky enough to get tickets for his talk at the Royal Geographical Society (along with apparently most of London’s geek population – talk about preaching to the converted).

Others have already transcribed his talk much better than we could have done, so we’ll stick to a few salient points. [Note: this is *very* hacked down for pertinence to this blog, hence the links to fuller notes and the full presentation at the bottom of the post].

Tufte on design …

The essential test of design is how well it assists the understanding of the content, not how stylish it is. You must understand the meaning of the content to design it. ‘Content indifference’ is the result of teaching that only design matters … Content matters! It’s a shame we live in a world where that counts as an insight.

On presenting and presentations …

There are two things you need to get across in a presentation – what the story is and why the audience should believe you.

On web design …

91 percent of pixels on the screen should be information.

On data visualisation …

It’s not a surface, it’s a depth.

At the end of the talk, we plucked up the courage to ask the great man a question. Asked what he thought about the current vogue for artists interpreting data with animations and so on, Tufte said, ‘I think they can do exactly what they please … one reason it’s alright is they’re not making other claims about the content, just using it as a found object. … I’ll stick with Matisse.’

Note: Lucy Spence’s brilliant sketch notes of the talk are on flickr whilst Intelligence Squared – who hosted the event – have a pay-per-view stream.

Day 1 in our new studio on the 3rd floor and the view out of the window looks like a page from Noise ….

Teen(y) fashion blogging sensation Tavi is now so famous that she’s presenting at luxury conferences. At the recent Generation Next conference she uttered what we think is a bit of a teen truism.

Even though her blog is about self-expression through fashion, this particular teenager believes her peers to be inherently tribal. She says, ‘Teachers, parents and TV shows are always telling us to be ourselves. But what we want more than anything is to belong, to feel like we’re in a clique.’

In Japan, the tribalism of teen culture is explicit. In Tokyo, Marui‘s teen store even sells clique-appropriate clothing by floor.

Flyfire Technology from Techspot on Vimeo.

We think this could be semi-adequately described as a 3D immersive reactive amorphous shape-shifting lighting application. Or something. Firefly is a MIT project by the SENSEable City Laboratory in collaboration with ARES Lab (Aerospace Robotics and Embedded Systems Laboratory) which aims to transform any ordinary space into a highly immersive and interactive display environment. It is made up of a swarm of self-organizing micro helicopters. Each helicopter contains small LEDs and acts as a smart pixel. Through precisely controlled movements, the helicopters perform elaborate and synchronized motions and form an elastic display surface for any desired scenario.

With the self-stabilizing and precise controlling technology from the ARES Lab, the motion of the pixels is adaptable in real time. The Flyfire canvas can transform itself from one shape to another or morph a two-dimensional photographic image into an articulated shape. The pixels are physically engaged in transitioning images from one state to another, which allows the Flyfire canvas to demonstrate a spatially animated viewing experience.

Firefly’s creators describe it as ‘pixels in space’. We just say: *WOW*.

Via LSN: Global.

Last month ATTIK UK moved into our new studio at 10 Hills Place, an ‘architectural intervention’ by Amanda Levete Architects. AL_A is run by the surviving partner of the legendary Future Systems firm and 10 Hills Place is redolent of their hyper-futuristic, shiny style.

According to ALA, the spaceship-like facade is inspired by the art work of Lucio Fontana (pictured), founder of the Spatialism movement. Featuring self-cleaning glass ‘eyelets’, the facade is finished in a high performance durable paint typically used on super yachts. Back in the mid 20th century, Fontana aimed to create art for “a new age” that would show the “real space of the world”. It’s apt, then, that our building now illuminates a previously dank and disused alleyway off Oxford Street.

We’re starting a new series of trend-driven pieces on the NoiseBlog as of today. The NOISES series will be a combination of interesting spots, think pieces and general need-to-know posts and commentary about the worlds that ATTIK UK intersect: design, hacking, technology, emergent media and so on. As ATTIK is the proud Northern child of a Japanese parent, we’re also going to make a concerted effort to look outside the NYLON and Western media bubbles to the places where innovation is really happening such as Japan, South Korea and …. Dundee.

Our first spot is the University of Dundee’s Prototype Symposium which is due to take place this June. We predict that prototyping will become one of this year’s design/hacking memes. Last year’s trend for DIY rapid prototyping has set the stage and Dundee are well ahead of the curve with their symposium. According to the organisers:

‘Creative entrepreneurs, practitioners and scholars are becoming increasingly used to a post-disciplinary environment, in which generative ideas are more influential than fixed categories. It has become more important than ever to understand concepts that traverse the world of making. One example is the prototype: an object conceived as a means to an end beyond itself.’

Such cross disciplinary working and a ‘just make it‘ attitude is absolutely our aim at ATTIK UK. It’s also part of the ATTIK DNA, as demonstrated in our ongoing Noise series, so we’re looking forward to seeing what this symposium produces with its impressively heterogenous line up of makers.

Speakers include NASA space architect, Constance Adams; international business guru Michael Schrage; product designers Leonardo Bonanni and Pieter Jan Stappers; Turner Prize winning artist Simon Starling; interactive jeweller Hazel White; cultural critic Norman Klein; participatory design methods pioneer Liz Sanders; art and architectural historian Frederic Schwartz; biomedical engineer Stuart Brown and design theorist Rosan Chow.

To add real-world, commercial robustness, debates and presentations will be chaired by folks such as Dee Cooper, Director of Product and Service for Virgin Atlantic; Chris Van der Kuyl, CEO BrightSolid Ltd, Steve Gill, product designer and academic, University of Wales Institute Cardiff and Colin Burns – a former Director of IDEO.

Pictured: MakerBot ‘CupCake’ DIY 3D printer. Yours for a mere $750.

Watching our Visual Identity System (VIS) work go live – in marketing terms, ‘activate’ – is always a huge thrill and ATTIK UK’s VIS for Coke‘s sponsorship of the 2010 FIFA World Cup is a case in point.

The global reach of this VIS shows that it has the flexibility to enable different markets to adapt it to their respective programmes and work streams on a local level. It’s especially cool when we find consumers recording work based around the VIS online – such as this flickr pic – as it means that our work is truly communicating in the way that it is supposed to – on both a global and local level.

This particular execution is a poster in Houston, Texas, and forms part of the global FIFA World Cup Trophy Tour for Coca-Cola. We worked with South African advertising agency Santos across the FIFA campaign.

Other Coca-Cola FIFA World Cup executions featuring the VIS have so far included press, online games, events, promotional wares and – of course – on pack – all over the world. The VIS has also featured on rapper K’NAAN‘s official world cup anthem (below).

Photograph from Haithar’s Coca-Cola Trophy Tour flickr set.

The Tokyo Innovation event showcased Dentsu’s work for clients such as ASICS, Uniqlo, SMART and Sony. Much of the work on display confirmed the strength of keitai [mobile] culture in Japan and, in particular, the mass adoption of mobile applications and platforms. What we in the West consider emergent or niche technologies – such as QR codes – have been mass in Japan for some years. QR has become a CRM tool as well as a communications device – in other words, it’s far from a marketing fad. For instance, Muji in Japan uses QR codes for consumer acquisition and retention. A QR code taken in store can give shoppers 10% off their purchases – a brilliant opt-in model of mobile marketing. Imagine if Western retail behemoths such as Tesco or Wal-Mart were able to utilise similar CRM tools …

Dentsu is also keeping firmly ahead of the mobile curve with Mobile Arts Lab – a collaboration between Dentsu planners and Robot Communications. One particularly impressive Mobile Arts Lab application is iButterly, which incorporates augmented reality, GSM and motion sensors to produce butterfly ‘coupons’ which can be ‘caught’ by users. Unlike many AR apps which are fun but not especially useful, iButterfly gives brands a platform to both engage and maintain consumers – potentially even tracking their purchasing behaviour. This is real communications innovation, Japanese-style.

The ATTIK UK team have arrived in Japan and were welcomed at Narita airport by this Coca-Cola sign – a neat reminder of our truly global client! Tomorrow we’ll be in Shiodome to work at the famous Dentsu building. Good thing we’ve acquired a head for heights …

We’re working with both our parent company Dentsu in Japan and sister company ATTIK SF on an exciting new project. Teams from each of the three agencies have been racking up air miles and carbon guilt to meet in SF and Tokyo.

First stop in San Francisco was a great chance to catch up with the ATTIK West Coast crew on 2nd Street – in particular, strategy director Cory and account director Rachel (pictured). ATTIK SF work with loads of very cool clients including Scion and Lexus for whom they have just launched the Darker Side of Green campaign.

Next stop: Tokyo.

We’re particularly chuffed that Fast Company has chosen to recognise our VIS work with clients such as Coca-Cola, writing that ‘this London firm gets the systems thinking that’s vital for for executing large-scale projects’. It’s also a brilliant accolade for the launch of our London office.

Will it be a wrench to move ATTIK away from Yorkshire after all these years?
The short answer is I’m not leaving the north, I’m invading the south. I know everyone gets hung up on geography. It’s funny. My experience over the last 25 years is that business has traditionally been very cyclical, rhythmic and geographically specific. People are naturally very proud of where they are from and I am no different. Historically, ATTIK has followed a geographical business model and flown the Huddersfield or Yorkshire flag across the world. “Where’s Huddersfield?” is a question I have answered more than any other question. I like answering it. The way I see it, to be a success, the model needs to keep pace. Sure we’ll always need an office and a place to sit, but I also believe the business of the future will be increasingly rootless, borderless and weightless. It has to be. We will all be defined as much by our ability to see opportunities as well as the ability to think up great ideas, provide advice and execute good work.

What are your ambitions for the company this year?
Recently I was told you don’t win a silver medal, you lose the gold. I liked that. For almost 25 years, it’s about winning – small steps at a time. We define winning in many different ways from financial success, to great clients, to attracting the best people or healthy collaboration. Definitely, as I have got older I recognise the importance of being respectful to the opposition and the reason why we all need to compete in a healthy way – it pushes you to win the gold(s).

Read the full interview on The Drum’s site (free registration req’d).

We’re looking for obsessive doodlers – from talented teenagers to professional artists – to work with ATTIK London on a concept for a major brand. Please contact @james_attik on twitter or james (at) attik (dot) com with examples of your work.

Lovely video doodle by Kristofer Ström.

The limited edition supercar — which ATTIK helped launch – has been so successful that Toyota Motor Corp. has stopped accepting reservations in Japan. The Lexus LFA has a global sales target of 500, but pre-orders for domestic sales have already reached about that number. The 4.8-liter, V10 560-h.p. LFA is priced at 37.5 million yen, making it the most expensive Japanese car on the market.

Check out ATTIK’s website and configurator for the Lexus LFA here.

Check out the new styling and can we developed for Coke Zero Avatar that uses Augmented Reality to blend this world and pandora…

A very powerful message about the importance of the work of The Prince’s Trust across the Yorkshire region, and in particular the immense positive impact we are having on the region’s economy during these challenging times.

Princes Trust Delivers
Trust Pays Off