LSN : News : Thought-starter: Is music now created for the internet?

Elvie launches the world’s first silent breast pump

Elvie Pump, UK

UK – The femtech brand was initially launched in 2015 with its Kegel trainer, a technology-enabled device that offers a hassle-free way for women to strengthen their pelvic floor and improve their bladder control. Now, the brand is addressing another issue that affects new mothers – breast pumping.

The Elvie Pump can be worn inside a bra and allows women to pump subtly and silently while on the move. True to the brand, the pump is enhanced by technology, allowing women to monitor their milk volume and control the device remotely from a corresponding app.

A campaign coinciding with the product launch looks to reduce the stigma surrounding breast pumping. The tongue-in-cheek music video has sharp lyrics that play on the idea that ‘100% *(ish) of women who breast bump feel like cows’.

With both product and campaign, Elvie is changing the tone of how most brands tackle the new mother experience.

Gucci is using Instagram to explore historical beauty

Gucci Beauty

Global – The luxury house has launched a new Instagram account that archives beauty in art through the ages.

While Gucci has borrowed decadent themes from the world of art history for years, the account, @guccibeauty, provides a more permanent space for the brand to discuss how the concept of beauty has evolved.

Featuring a range of faces – including lesser-known 15th-century figures such as Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, mummy portraits from Roman Egypt and women from 19th-century Japan – Gucci Beauty is providing a lesson in art history for followers of the brand. Each image is accompanied by the title and year of the painting, its artist, where it is on show, and a paragraph explaining why the piece is historically influential.

The educational project shows an unexpected development of the Instagram Beauty Market we explored in 2017. Like Dazed Beauty, the media brand’s recently launched avant-garde vertical that will unveil a full website on 26 September, Gucci Beauty highlights why beauty on Instagram does not have to be simply product shots and colour swatches.

In the future, craft could be digital-only

Amsterdam – Textile designers Karen Huang and Jason Page have created A Really Fake Future, a project that translates 3D materials into 2D images.

In collaboration with photography studio Unseen Amsterdam, the designers have envisaged a future in which traditional textile handicrafts such as quilting and embroidery are replaced by digital representations, due to the amount of human labour and time it takes to traditionally fashion these textiles.

The exhibition, on show at creative space iso, will include a large-scale woven tapestry and five digital videos that explore how these textiles can ‘live new lives beyond material and craft-time limitations’.

The idea that physical fashion and textiles could be recreated in the digital sphere is one we will be exploring in our forthcoming fashion macrotrend. Keep an eye on the Fashion sector to read more.

A Really Fake Future by Jason Page and Karen Huang

A device to improve braille literacy in South Korea

Dot Pad by Dot Inc.

Dot Pad by Dot

South Korea – The Dot Pad is a tool that allows the visually impaired to read books and browse the web.

Created by cloudandco, the product is the Seoul-based design studio’s latest iteration of the Dot Watch, a smartwatch that repositioned braille devices as objects of desire.

The Dot Pad uses 99 multi-layered braille cells to create a larger-scale tool that allows visually impaired people to access the digital world by translating online sources into braille using its AI Dot Translation Engine. It can then be used for educational purposes, reading books, playing games and browsing the internet. With sleek design, the device is simple for visually impaired users to learn.

‘Meeting visually impaired individuals, I realized that they have been waiting, deeply longing to own a beautiful device for a very long time,’ says Yeongkyu Yoo, the co-founder of cloudandco.

The Dot devices are luxurious assistive products, which cloudandco have celebrated with minimal yet stylish design. For more, read our Implicit Inclusivity design direction.

Stat: More Millennial men will be stay-at-home dads

According to Visa’s recent Millennial Research Study, which was conducted by Lieberman Research Worldwide, today’s young men are more open to the prospect of being a stay-at-home father than the previous generation. As more men take an equal role in child-rearing, they will seek out platforms like Fatherly that recognise the humour and emotion that comes with being a dad.

The study also focuses on insights around women’s lifestyles and their attitudes towards finance, and how this differs to men. It found that 58% of Millennial women feel guilty spending on themselves, compared to 45% of men. Visa has recently been upgrading its visual language around money to better address young people, launching a video initiative for women last month.

Thought-starter: Is music now created for the internet?

While streaming services have expanded our musical libraries, junior foresight writer Holly Friend believes a new generation of artists are creating records with our digital habits in mind.

Experts have suggested that streaming services such as Spotify are spearheading a non-committal listening mentality. As well as making it easy for users to skip between songs, it also provides financial gain for song creators – the Billboard charts now count 150 streams of a song as one song purchase.

At the helm of a movement towards shorter songs is a new generation of young rappers, who are squeezing their rhymes into albums that barely hit the 30-minute mark. Released late last year, Lil Pump’s breakout song Gucci Gang became the shortest song in 42 years to reach the top 10 of the Hot 100 chart, at just two minutes and four seconds.

Not to be outdone, 22-year-old artist Tierra Whack won critical acclaim in May 2018 when she released a 15-minute audio-visual project called Whack World, comprising 15 one-minute songs. The one-minute length also conveniently fits within Instagram’s 60-second video limit, something that Whack has hinted was intentional.

To find out more about Insta-albums, read our microtrend Social Media Music.