At the San Francisco restaurant Creator, cheeseburgers are made entirely by a new autonomous machine. When I ask how a startup launching one eatery at a time could become a $10 billion company, Creator co-founder and CEO Alex Vardakostas looks me dead in the eye and says, “the market is much bigger than that.”
Young people’s love of fast fashion is coming under the scrutiny of Britain’s law-makers. MPs say the fashion industry is a major source of the greenhouse gases that are overheating the planet. Discarded clothes are also piling up in landfill sites and fibre fragments are flowing into the sea when clothes are washed. The retailers admit more needs to be done, but say they are already working to reduce the impact of their products.
The fields of graphic design and semiotics are inextricably linked. In this way, the first logo creators were most likely the ancient Egyptians, who designed images to convey socio-cultural values and established visual codes of representation. But as the industrial revolution began to give rise to consumer culture as we know it, logo design remained mostly utilitarian; images that represented brands often depicted either the product, the service, or something related to its manufacture, such as a factory.
Do you think that the private thoughts in your head could influence how other people — or creatures — act? The answer is “Of course not,” right? Because to say yes would be to admit you believe in mind control or telekinesis or some other phenomenon usually reserved for superhero comic books.
Today, customers can interact with companies in more ways than ever, across unique channels, devices, and time zones. A customer might see a company’s ad, visit their website, browse their products, read customer reviews, and go on their way—all without speaking to a single human. While technology and automation have unquestionably improved our lives, they’ve also made the modern customer experience much noisier. Countless customer interactions happen around the clock, and many fly below the radar.
