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the mindISSUE 01 forgotten landscapes

A backlash against our obsession with the now


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editors letter

Hello and welcome to our first edition of the Hive Mind Magazine, from the Cultural intelligence team at Flamingo. Hive Mind is our global community of experts. in the Cultural intelligence team we work with experts to understand the social, cultural and behavioural shifts that define the New Mainstream. We believe that there is more than one type of expert. From the Culture Thinkers, the gurus and commentators, to the Culture Makers, the people who are busy pushing the boundaries forwards by their daily enterprise and habits. We have been building this community for a few months now, and have gathered together some really exciting people who we work with in many different ways to add value and brand building ideas for our clients. We hand pick experts across industries, geographies and communities, who can show us and tell us about real culture in action. We build longer, closer, more connected relationships with our experts, to give us richer cultural intelligence. each issue of the magazine focuses on a different topic, and showcases the richness and diversity of our expert community. in this issue we have worked with psychologists, architects, academics and heritage campaigners. We also introduce our ‘expert hero’ of this edition, Liam Young, an futurist, critic, curator and all round interesting man. This edition is all about ‘Forgotten Landscapes’, a provocative counter trend to the accelerated churn of productivity and Now-ism of today’s world. By exploring the physical ‘forgotten spaces’ of our world, and the fascination they hold for people, we explore a new way to connect with space – be that built space or brand space. We hope this magazine interests and intrigues you! Please get in contact if you’d like to talk about how our expert off er can help you.

Happy reading,Amy Rait And Miriam Rayman from the CI [email protected]

p04 Contributors p05 Photo essay

p06 Forgotten landscapesp10 Social analytics

p12 In focusp13 Naoto Matsumura

p14 Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

p15 Shahira Hammad

p16 Unknown Fields Division

p18 The Chettinad Mansions

p19 Detroit

20 Hashima Island

p22 Why we need it p24 Brand take-outs

Photography (High Line NYC) Robocop vs. Bambi by JMacPherson


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contributors

Liam Young currently lives and works in London as an independ-ent designer, futurist, critic and curator. He is one of the coordina-tors of the nomadic design studio unknown Fields Division and is a founder of the think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today, a group whose work explores the consequences of fantastic, perverse and underrated urbanisms.

Phil Dobson (Bsc (Hons), MBPss, DHyp, BsCH (Assoc)) is the Founder of BrainWorkshops. He has a degree in Psychology and is a fully accredited Clinical Hypnotherapist and NLP Practitioner. He set up BrainWorkshops to enable individuals to learn how to use their brains better; applying what we know about the brain to enhance people’s lives and experience.

Bernard Dragon and Michel Adment are architects and designers, restorers and campaigners. Originally from France, they’ve collabo-rated on architecture projects such as the National Grand Theater in Bejing. Travelling to Chettinard’s (Tamil Nadu, india) searching for reclaimed materials, they fell in love with the place and restored one of the palaces into an award winning luxury hotel, saratha Villas.

Barbara Kaucky (Dipl ing Arch RiBA) is a director of erect archi-tecture, a London based architecture practice, which she founded with susanne Tutsch in 2002. Together with their team, Barbara and susanne work on design and user centred architectural, public realm and community engagement projects seeking to create welcoming and enjoyable spaces, which people take on as their own.

Shahira Hammad is an architect from Alexandria, egypt. she holds a Master of science degree from the university of Applied Arts, die Angewandte, Vienna where she graduated with distinc-tion in 2012. shahira is interested in architecture as an interdisci-plinary field. shahira’s projects have been published and exhibited internationally.

Bryan James is an interactive designer with 5 years experience, working at epiphany search based in Leeds. He created an inter-active digital experience of Hashima island, Japan. When Google released the street view photography, he wanted to reveal this hid-den island and its stories, so creating an atmospheric tour of this island abandoned in the 1970s.

A Glimpse into Manhattan’s Future? by Dee de Lara, , Flamingo NY

Within a three-block radius of my east Village apartment, empty lots sit vacant and fenced off with no apparent intention of being developed or renewed. in a place where space is at an absolute premium, these seemingly abandoned pieces of land feel like liminal spaces sandwiched between hubs of activity: apartment buildings where ten-ants live squeezed wall-to-wall on top of each oth-er, and stores and restaurants where money and ideas are exchanged 24-7. People flutter past these every single day with-out the urge to peer in and see beyond the locked chain link gates or poster-adorned plywood. Are these haunted, sacred spaces in a city where no space is off limits, ghosts of buildings past or pre-monitions of the urban future? And who holds the key to the locks? Right now, they just sit undis-turbed and unattended, quietly isolated from New York City’s cacophonous buzz.



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“These vast empty spaces make us feel in a way which alleviates us from that agonising sense of self importance and ego-ism which is otherwise clinging to us like a bad smell…Anything which puts us

into perspective, in some way. Its a nice way of feeling small.”Alain de Botton, School of Life Sunday Service, ‘On Pessimism’.

Forgotten landscapes A modern love aff air by Amy Rait

When Liam Young and Kate Davies launched their Unknown Fields Division, leading tourists on annual field trips into unknown or forgot-ten landscapes such as the Roswell crash site or the Chernobyl exclusion zone, they did so as part of an architectural research practice. They had no idea these expeditions would generate such a devoted following or ever be featured on the cover of Icon Magazine.

Pioneers like Liam and Kate have a mission - to ‘bear witness’ to these forgotten places, to bring back stories and lessons about how our lives as modern city dwellers are aff ected by these places, and vice versa, both now and in the future. They seek out the places on the fringes of our existence, such as the Madagascan rainforest, or mining com-munities in the Australian outback. They search for the wonderful, the deserted, the extreme.

But beyond this intriguing initiative, and beyond this ecological agenda, we are seeing a growing fascination with forgotten places of all kinds. Peo-ple are yearning to find, and experience, aban-doned, hidden spaces, both far away and also closer to home. This is a symptom of a wider need people have to create perspective beyond today’s myopic and superficial churn of the new.

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“Most people don’t understand what the word ‘decadent’ means….They think it means ‘fancy’ and ‘luxury’ but actually, it’s something in a state of decay.”Andre Walker, designer and fashion consultant in an interview with Katharine Zarrella

“These places help us reclaim something we have lost. They provide a connection to our world, our place in time, and place within nature.” Phil Dobson, psychologist.

Forgotten landscapes

Decadence and ‘Decay Porn’

The burgeoning photographic trend focusing on these spaces is known as ‘ruin porn’ or ‘decay porn’ and demonstrates the allure of decay. There’s an attraction to an imperfect, crumbling world as a backlash to the over polished sterile minimalism of today. “Our problem with now is that we are ob-sessed with production and perfection” says ar-chitect shahira Hammad, “We’re in denial, ignoring the fact that we will die someday, our own eventu-al demise. Our modern buildings show our denial, they are rigid, perfectly aligned, clean, functional modern spaces.”

Our current attraction to the decaying is also a wry look at the dystopia on the horizon from our hy-per-superficial consumerist lifestyles. Here there is something of the last days of Rome, or the last days before the French revolution.

We live in a world where weakness and imperfec-tion are invisible, blinked out of existence. We are one of the first generations to have not seen death, up close and personal, as death becomes the pre-serve of hospitals and hospices. We no longer have mourning around open caskets. This feels normal to us, but compared to other societies (such as ancient Amazonian tribes where the dead were re-buried in the family hearth to keep them close and bless the remaining family), we are an oddity. “Our reality is really quite skewed,” says psychologist Phil Dobson, “we live focused at the small end of the scale, zoomed in on just one part of the human experience and so we miss out on understanding scale and true meaning.”

By living huddled up in the small beginnings of na-ture’s life cycle, it creates a disjoint with the reality of life, and nature. is it any wonder we fetishize the ruin and decay of forgotten landscapes?

Paradise lost

We’ve grown up with the mirage that hoteliers and lotteries peddle to us, of our own little piece of par-adise, timeless and unchanging, unspoilt and undis-covered, that soothes the soul and wipes away the trivialities of an imperfect life.

The search for a more and more authentic ‘para-dise’ has not been successful. As a more sophis-ticated and knowledgeable generation grows up, they are no longer seeking this perfect paradise, but are looking for another kind of experience, in unexpected places. Bradley L Garrett, author of ex-plore everything; Place Hacking the City, suggests that people are “driven by their need to explore in an age where everything is mapped, to find the hid-den in a world where we can look up anything”.

so out of the ashes of this unrequited dream comes a search for something more interesting, and at-tainable – the search for real places with a depth of history and connection. Places that tell the story of man, time and nature. in a world of self-referential culture, these forgotten landscapes show the oft ignored, rough underside of the world. We delight in their realness and imperfection, rather than the many manufactured experiences of ‘authenticity’ that surround us in todays world.

There is a change happening; from the endless search for a perfect ‘lost paradise’, to finding beauty in ‘paradise lost’.

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Social analytics Word from the web by Giulia Bazoli and Lee Fordham, Flamingo Digital

21 min.

4.2 sec.

54 sec.

11 min.

3 min.

RUIN PORN

WILDERNESS

UNKNOWN FIELDS

SERENDIPITY

WABI SABI

tonydetroit

bipolaire61

newsjean

wabi sabi

“uploads snapshots from aban-doned parts of his city.”

“Wide, open, expan-sive snapshots from life in the arctic.”

“AP’s Korea Bureau chief up-loading snapshot of everyday

life in North Korea “

“images that reflect the natural cycle of growth, decay and death.”

PHOTOGRAPHS CAPTURING CONTEMPORARY RUINS

CELEBRATING THE REMOTE AND ADVENTURE OF THE WILD

INVESTIGATING FORGOTTEN AND OBSOLETE LANDSCAPES

UNEXPECTED OUTCOMES; CHANCE ENCOUNTERS; RANDOM HAPPENINGS

JAPANESE MOVEMENT ON THE ACCEPTANCE OF TRANSIENCE AND THE IMPERFECTION OF THINGSAbigail Tee

@saysthequeen - 24/09Re-watching my fa-vorite video; Be a Moses, go into the wilderness, get epiphanies and rev-elations. Athul M R @athulexe - 7/09The continued existence of wildlife and wilder-ness is important to the quality of life for hu-mans Maureen berglind @yelowsubmaureen - 24/09Half of me wants to get straight As and a sweet job but half of me wants to drop out and move into the wilderness

Andrew Zimmern @andrewzimmern - 23/093 days in Vancouver and I can’t fi nd a single thing wrong with this town. Urban perfection on the edge of idyllic wilderness & vast seas

Kat Hahn@daddycaniburnit - 17/09Wabi-Sabi. In a nutshell it acknowledges 3 reali-ties: nothing lasts, noth-ing is fi nished & nothing is perfect. Huckberry �@huckberry - 13/09Exploring the Japanese aesthetic of Wabi-Sabi, and how we need it now more than ever http://bit.ly/18ZyeoP

Romantic Dominant @romdominant - 25/09A conversation, a mouse click, a stroke of serendipity, a false note, a disappointment Butterfl y effect Every-thing can change In an instant. Ideas Lab@ideaslaboratory - 24/09Serendipity can be a source of #innova-tion, but not in a world where we all consume the same information” http://ow.ly/paiGT

Regine Debatty @wmmna - 29/05Unknown Fields Mada-gascar Expedition Sign Up @unknownfi elds Joshua Caterino @JoshuaCaterino - 10/10#Design Inspiration: Unknown Fields Divi-sion from Roswell to Burning Man http://ow.ly/2sBRAk

Otisredn �@otisredn - 18/09 So give Detroit a break and educate yourself be-fore you participate in ruin porn, you’re miss-ing out on the magi... Erin Spens @erinspens - 25/09I’m talking porn (ruin porn) this Fri 27th at @V_and_A Museum!http://bit.ly/UnLHFgDefending Detroit, Athens, and probably blushing a lot

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From the villages of palaces left behind, to the global exploits of urban explorers, from the popularity of the ‘wabi sabi’ aesthetic, to the rise of the ‘ruin porn’ genre of photography, we have fallen in love with the poignancy of the left behind. The eerie silence, de-serted buildings and a sense of a human story cap-tured like a fly in amber, written into landscape.

search termMentioned

every...(Jan. 2012)

instagramprofile

Pinterestprofile Followers Following

Stacey Hash @staceyhashh - 23/09Serendipity - fi nding something good with-out looking for it. TessyBritton @tessybritton - 24/09[Clever cities] might even put at risk the ser-endipity that makes cit-ies such creative places” says @richardsennett

Domus @DomusWeb 03/08@unknownfi elds Divi-sion, Part I: Cherno-byl. An excursion to the zones where myths of the near future are manufactured: http://bit.ly/qVM3If

Pete Collard@petecollard - 25/07Struggling to get back into London work mode without epic landscapes rolling past the window #unknownfi elds

Em Carter @avengedseinfeld - 19/09This is the fi rst time I’ve heard ruin porn in an academic context.

Vahnee @vahnee - 29/11I love the dramatized and undramatized tragedy of ruin porn. http://bit.ly/YbsTv9

Abby Wynne �@abbynrghealing - 8/09The Japanese culture of Wabi Sabi - when we are broken we heal and are forever changed, and all the more… Arielleford �@arielleford - 14/10http://WabiSabiLove.com Being a Wabi Sabi cou-ple means to give and receive, not just dump and vent.


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Naoto Matsumura

Our Sole Survivor

by Sinikka Heden

Tomioka in Fukushima’s nuclear exclusion zone has become a place lost in time, destined for his-tory but “saved” by one man. Whilst our world de-fined by speed moves on, Matsumara a 50-year-old farmer and resident of Tomioka remains; choosing to jeopardize his own health to care for all the pets that were left behind. “I refuse to leave and let go.” He told the Tokyo press back in 2011. And in doing so, he has become something of a quiet hero for Japan. With a website, facebook page and palpable global following.

Is it the attraction of him being the sole survivor in an apocalypse-like situation that draws us to his story so? From a safe distance we can explore how that might feel. Or perhaps we are moved by this man who has chosen to stay behind and remember whilst the rest of his country moves on to forget. Either way we can’t help but worry about how it will end and wonder if his followers will still be with him then?

In focus Forgotten landscapes across the world by Sinikka Heden, Miriam Rayman and Amy Rait

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Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

A celebration of nature’s life cycle

by Amy Rait

Within two-weeks of the end of the 2012 Olympics the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park was back in pub-lic use thanks to erect architecture, the architecture agency who won the competition to develop the site. We love what they are doing to the park be-cause of its focus on the theme of life cycles which is something that resonates with our interest in forgotten landscapes. The design of the park, café, water play space and landscaped areas not only ac-counts for the life cycle of nature, but delights in it, using new and old together to create one harmo-nious and intriguing whole. “At the highest point, a giant tree – blasted as if by lightning – allows a clambering route up within the thickness of the trunk to the loftiest perch,” says erect architecture, co-founder, Barbara Kaucky.

erect architecture are also known for their tempo-rary structures as part of the Studio in the Woods initiative. Be it a badger or skywatching platform these are structures designed to sag and even improve over time. And whilst this is becoming a common trend within architecture it still feels new within branded products. Only now are we begin-ning to see clever brands considering the lifecycle of their products and incorporating this into the design and experience.

Shahira Hammad

Could business harness spontaneous order too? by Amy Rait

This incredible scene looks like a dark vision of the future, it’s actually, Egyptian architect Shahira Ham-mad’s latest proposal for the redevelopment of West-bahnhof Train Station in Austria. It’s a picturesque study of decay, celebrating the imperfect, the or-ganic and nature’s sheer messiness. Which when you think of architecture’s obsession with the neat and rigid is quite a dramatic break away. No wonder Ham-mad’s designs have drawn a lot of attention -- not least from the Hive Mind. As we talk more about sus-tainable cities and the need to be more in harmony with nature, could this be what they start to look like? “I’m trying to bring the complexities of nature into the urban fabric,” Hammad told Hive Mind, “I explore growth and decay and celebrate the spontaneous or-der that all of nature is designed around.”

Hammad may be spearheading this as an architec-tural aesthetic but it has relevance for broader cul-tural shifts too. It reflects this newfound hunger to move away from the safe, normal, rational and con-trolled. Might we start to see more brands embrace the excess and chaos of living in a natural world where decay is part of the story? It may feel at odds with today’s productivity focused business environ-ment, but we shouldn’t be afraid to let something grow and see where it goes instead of trying to con-trol everything.

In focus


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“We started with an aim to go off in search of wild, empty landscapes but we haven’t found them yet,” ex-plains Young of the unknown Fields expeditions which have so far taken a mix of keen tourists and research-ers to New Mexico’s Area 51; the Chenobyl exclusion Zone and the Madagascan Rainforest, amongst other intrepid locations. “Part of the greatest discoveries of our trips is that these spaces are only forgotten for us. in fact, we’ve always found people living a pretty banal existence in the places we visit.”

What Young, Davies and the unknown Fields team found is that what we imagine to be forgotten land-scapes are part of a very designed process of forget-ting. it suits our modern way of living to actively forget these places. They are reminders to a time we’d rather not be faced with; or they put a downer on our con-sumer culture, giving evidence of its negative eff ects on the world’s natural environment and resources.

And this has become a core mission driving Young and Davies’s explorations forward. “A lot of the issues we confront on the trips are really challenging,” he says,

“it becomes a life changing experience for the people who come along.” Young describes the blood like pud-dles they witnessed creeping across the Madagascan rainforest this year, fallout from the local cobalt and nickel mines excavated to keep our laptops and smart phones whizzing along.

The truth hurts it seems and we’d rather not be faced with it. But according to Young, this reckoning is a nec-essary process that modern society must go through to get to a new way of living. if not on the expeditions then hopefully through the range of outputs that the fieldtrips generate.

“it’s palpable in the air that there’s an urgent need to be talking about these issues,” says Young. Which is why a crucial part of the unknown Fields expeditions is the counter-narratives, fictions and role-play sce-narios that the researchers generate. so far they’ve published a graphic novel ‘Alien encounters’; a book on Chernobyl entitled “Guilty Landscapes”; and as-sembled The space Orchestra from Nasa scientists who performed Ground Control: An Opera in space directed by artist, Nelly Ben Hayoun.

Their next expedition, due to take place August 2014, has just been announced and is now open for appli-cants. We’d love Hive Magazine readers to join the ex-plorers but be warned this is a trip that we will most probably change your life. You may encounter land-scapes you will find hard to forget. Your conscious may undergo a moral shift and you may experience temporary feelings of unease.

Unknown Fields Division An unforgettable interview with co-founder Liam Young by Miriam Rayman

“We started with an aim to go off in search of wild, empty landscapes but we haven’t found them yet.”Liam Young, architect and futurist, founder of the Unknown Fields Division

In focus

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the Chettinad mansions Ghost villages are being brought back to life by Miriam Rayman

Society’s growing fascination with forgotten plac-es isn’t just a western obsession. Here we travel to the Chettinad region in India’s Tamil Nadu to find out why these deserted mansions are reported by one Indian paper to be one of the fastest growing holiday destinations in the country. Once home to the lavish palaces of the Chettiars, a tightly knit group of travelling merchants, whose commercial empire stretched all the way to Burma, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam. Today, all that is left of the Chettiar’s banking prowess, that experienced steep decline during the depression of the 1930s, are the region’s ghost villages and the decaying remains of these once lavish mansions.

Except for those which are being snapped up, renovated and turned into boutique hotels such as Saratha Villas in the small village of Kotha-mangalam, which French couple Bernard Dragon and Michel Adment fell in love with and 18 months later have brought back to life. “People love the eerie feeling of going back in time when they come here,’ Dragon told Hive Mind, ‘The architecture lends itself to deep introspection which makes it a favourite for yoga and meditation retreats.” No wonder the couple are now campaigning to make the region a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Detroit A post-industrial future

by Amy Rait

These forgotten landscapes are not about retreat-ing into the past, or looking at a world left behind, these places make us think about our lives today, and lead us to wonder what we will build in the future. How will people live and use the environ-ment that surrounds them? The most infamous ‘ruined’ landscape of our time is clearly Detroit. Although for some it is about the shock and awe of a city in decay, they are drawn to it as ruin porn. For others this is a glimpse into our future. As film maker Julien Temple, who directed BBC’s Requi-em For Detroit documentary says, “it is possible to feel you’ve travelled 1000 years into the future, and that among the ruins of Detroit, lies a first pioneers map to the post industrial future which awaits us all.”

So it is also by looking to the future that we see the reality of Detroit, not a fossil captured at its death, but as a city with inhabitants who are striv-ing to create a new life of entrepreneurial spirit.

In focus



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Hashima island Digital reminders by Amy Rait

Early this year when Google decided to release street view shots from the uninhabited island of Hashima in Nagasaki, the world got a look back at this forgotten landscape. Until 1974 this was a thriving Mitsubushi mining community. Today it is a lifeless ghost town, and one which designer Bryan James has declared his fascination with. So much in fact, that he decided to develop a website that offers the viewer an interactive journey around this landscape using Google Chrome: http://hashima-island.co.uk. “The island was emptied so quickly that many items and possessions still remain for you to find as you explore the landscape and inte-riors.” He says, “What remains is lost history, just waiting to be lived all over again.”

And today that doesn’t have to be from visiting the location. What James has shown us is that through the digital realm we can have access to these ob-scure places too. Could consumers be taken on a tour through past brand landscapes in this way? Could they get a little look into original ad cam-paigns, or have a poke around old factory space, or original factory towns like Bournville even? Brands are fertile ground for picking through the archives. And just as society is looking back to ground itself, brands might like to try that too.

In focus

“It is possible to feel you’ve travelled

1000 years into the future, and that

among the ruins… lies a first pioneers

map to the post industrial future

which awaits us all”Julien Temple, director, Requiem For Detroit, BBC documentary

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Forgotten Perspectives We live in a world where we seem obsessed with the immediate, with getting things done; with action, focus, logic and rationality. in our striving for ever increasing efficiency, we are more likely to be limiting our effectiveness.

Not only is our attention and mental energy more limited than we think, we also know from experience that to gain an understanding of context, we must sometimes take a step back. Being too focused on the now - on action, strategy and deadlines, we risk missing the bigger picture all together. These forgotten landscapes can play a crucial role in providing this well needed counter-balance.

Insight Seeing it’s no coincidence that insights come at certain times. They come when we stop thinking (in the shower), or when we are tired of think-ing (those insights that come just before bed), or when we distract ourselves by thinking about something else (einstein used to play the violin). so here we suggest you close your laptop and go in search of a forgotten landscape instead, because this might put your brain in a more creative state.

During exercise, Beta brain waves (associated with active cognition) slow down, to become Alpha waves (associated with a calmer mind). And research suggests that’s when we tend to experience ‘eureka moments’ (a burst of high frequency Gamma waves).

Embrace the UnfamiliarOur brains respond positively to exploration. For example, research has shown that when compared to London bus drivers, London taxi drivers have enlarged hippocampi – a region of the brain associated with spatial memory which is a testament to the merits of exploration and novelty on the function of the brain.

We all benefit from neuroplasticity - our brain’s ability to learn and adapt. But if we don’t continue to expose ourselves to the unfamiliar we’ll lose that skill. Our brains are like muscles, and by exploring alien landscapes we help to keep them agile.

Why we need it The Psychology of Forgotten Landscapes by Phil Dobson, psychologist and founder of Brain Workshops


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We delight in the perspec-tive jolt of being somewhere truly diff erent, a diff erent re-ality and on a diff erent time-line how could a brand recre-ate those conditions pulling us out of the everyday and offering another way to gain perspective. For example Axe’s playful campaigns which twist narratives around the protago-nist, or the entrancing smirnoff Apple Bite signature serve TVC (By Mother), with its time lapse movements, and a hypnotic re-ality interspersed with chaotic music and dance.

We have seen that brands can think about nature in differ-ent ways. embracing the entire lifecycle is a good place to start. Why not glory in decay and re-sist the over riding urge to make things ever more perfect. The luxury industry for one is em-bracing this, upholding a beauty in the time ravaged such as with the Rough Luxe hotel. Could your industry follow their lead too?

Rather than looking at nature as the sustainability box you have to tick, think about using na-ture and technology in harmony together instead of as apposing forces. The mass commercializa-tion of natural hair oils in particular Argan oil is a good example of how this can be done successfully. Not to mention the innovative Beco line of baby and pet accessories, such as the baby step and potty that that can be buried after end use to add nutrients to the garden as they decompose.

People are starting to real-ize that letting technologi-cal capability set the agenda will create a dysfunctional and unhappy world. And they are beginning to explore what our needs and boundaries are and developing new behav-iours such as observing a Digi-tal sabbath, luxury digital detox hotel, or merely remembering to switch over to the ‘Do not Disturb’ mode on the iPhone. it’s also relevant for a non-tech brand to think in this way. How to help consumers create the space and boundaries they need to pull away from the of-ten overwhelming nature of technology?

We see serendipity not only becoming rarer, but also be-coming more revered. We are moving in more streamlined and similar circles, giving us more of the same. We think we are ex-ploring the whole wide world, yet because of these personalized results, people get a smaller and smaller range of content each time. What people actually want is something from beyond their remit. Can brands be coura-geous enough to exist in the un-expected instead of just serving up ‘more of the same newness’?

The realness of forgotten places and the fascination it holds for people relates back to our search for authenticity. Can your brand integrate the particular kind of authenticity that comes with that which has been humbled by time. it’s not only heritage brands such as Hovis, Hellman’s or the various whisky brands which can do this.

Brand take-outs What Forgotten Landscapes signal for brand relationships by Miriam Rayman and Amy Rait

1. Hamilton Pool by Dan Machold, a state of manmade pools to come?

2. Stain, teacups designed to improve through use, by Bethan Laura Wood.

3. Living wall by orange brompton

4. Tree Hotel, Harads, Norrbotten County, swede by Niklas Jumlin

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the mindEditors

Amy Rait, Miriam Rayman

ContributorsGiulia Bazoli, Lee Fordham, Dee de Lara, Sinikka Heden; Liam Young, Phil Dobson,

Bryan James, Bernard Dragon and Michel Adment, Barbara Kaucky, Shahira Hammad

Art direction / Graphic designArno Devo

ThanksAnnie Auerbach, Adam Chmielowski, Ioana Bejenaru,

Lee Fordham, Sandra Mardin and Tom Jackson

This is a Flamingo owned product generated for its own insight and for that of its clients. No part of this document should be reproduced for public or private use unless alongside mention of Flamingo, Cultural Intelligence, including a link back to the Hive

Mind Magazine site.

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