LSN : News : Thought-starter: Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?

Tinder’s unapologetic celebration of being single

Single is a Terrible Thing to Waste by Wieden + Kennedy for Tinder. Photography by Ryan McGinley, New York

US – The dating app’s latest campaign hopes to tell its Millennial users that being single can be a positive lifestyle choice.

With such a large community of singles signed up, Tinder claims to have a front-row seat in modern dating culture. As part of the campaign, the brand conducted a survey into the dating behaviour of 18–25-year-olds in the US, and found that they value their independence – 72% have made a conscious decision to be single for a time.

To represent this shift in attitude towards the single life, Tinder launched a digital campaign shot by photographer Ryan McGinley. ‘We had an epiphany when working on this that was right in front of us – why is society always trying to un-single the single people?’ says Laddie Peterson, creative director at Wieden + Kennedy, the agency behind the series of ads.

As Millennials’ priorities shift from the pursuit of long-term relationships to more transient romance, family structures will also evolve. For more on how brands are embracing this post-family mindset, read our microtrend.

This solar-powered website goes offline when it’s cloudy

Low-tech Magazine

Barcelona – Low-tech Magazine has launched a new website that demonstrates how we can radically reduce the amount of energy required when surfing the web.

To make the website energy-efficient, it is built to be static, using default typefaces and compressed images that are given a coloured tint to represent the article type. By doing this, the average page size of the blog is radically decreased, while also providing a simpler aesthetic.

The website is self-hosted and powered by a solar panel at the Barcelona home of its founder, Kris De Decker. Because the solar panel is run off-grid, the website will occasionally go offline when the weather is cloudy for long periods. A battery icon displayed on the site shows the current level of power, alongside a weather report ‘to help visitors plan their visits to Low-tech Magazine’.

At a time when technology companies are battling for user attention, some are beginning to consider whether content and browsing can be designed differently. For more, explore our macrotrend The Focus Filter, and designing for a digital resistance.

A patch that can monitor blood pressure

San Diego – A team at the University of California have created the first wearable device that can sense deep below the surface of skin.

The silicon elastomer stick-on patch, which can be worn on the neck, sends ultrasonic waves that penetrate the skin and reflect off the wearer’s tissues and blood. Then reflections are sent back to a sensor, and the data can then be analysed through a computer.

Designed as an alternative to a blood pressure cuff, which doesn’t offer continuous monitoring, a study on the project found that the patch can continuously monitor central blood pressure, allowing doctors to keep track of patients with heart conditions over time.

In the future, wearables will provide intuitive feedback for personalised health monitoring. We explore this topic further in the Foresight section of Certified Wellness.

Chronic Health: Designing a Healthy Future, Dutch Design Week

Snapchat is creating AR-enabled tv series

Snap Originals

Global – Users of the photo-sharing app can not only watch the shows, but step into their narratives using augmented reality (AR).

Snap Originals, which will drop new episodes daily, includes comedies, mystery thrillers and documentaries, all targeted at teen audiences. Viewers can watch the episodes through the existing Snapchat app, and can also be immersed in the shows with a new AR portal.

The new feature enables viewers to step into the scene by swiping up. They can also look around the scene through 360 degrees. ‘Right now [the viewers] are additive, maybe they become more part of the narrative, and eventually, you have whole stories take place in a series of five portals,’ says Sean Mills, head of original content at Snap. ‘You solve a crime or watch two people fall in love, where the whole show is experienced in this virtual world.’

In a bid to entertain shorter attention spans, brands such as Snapchat are inviting teenagers to play a role in their storytelling. For more, read our Chat Fiction microtrend.

Stat: The opportunity for women’s sports

A new study by Nielsen tracks the rise of women’s sports and identifies the opportunity for brands in this sector. According to the report, which looks at eight global markets, 84% of general sports fans have an interest in women’s sports. Of these respondents, 51% were male, debunking the perception that these sports are only watched by women.

This month, Fifa pledged its commitment to women’s football by launching its first global strategy for the sport. The initiative aims to make football more accessible to females from a young age, and keep women involved in the sport for longer.

As part of our Female Futures series, we investigated the rise of the Street Sport Rebels – females who are using urban sports as a means of activism.

Thought-starter: Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?

Dr Anjan Chatterjee, the author of The Aesthetic Brain, says multiculturalism is changing our experience of beauty, yet technology is reducing the ability to have profound visual experiences.

Chatterjee’s book, The Aesthetic Brain, considers humankind’s journey through the world of beauty, pleasure and art through a neuroscience lens. ‘We know that people’s brains respond to facial beauty, but that in parts of the occipital cortex – which specialises in processing faces and objects – there is increased neural activity when people are looking at attractive faces versus less attractive faces.’

‘The question is: what makes a face attractive? Certain things seem to be true across all cultures, and they are traits that infants are also more responsive to,’ he says. ‘The classic ones are symmetry, and for heteronormative preferences, what’s referred to as sexual dimorphism, which is the way that oestrogen tends to affect women’s faces and testosterone men’s.’

However, Chatterjee believes urban environments are changing our perception of beauty. ‘For each of us who are fortunate to live in diverse cultures, I believe we are expanding our concept of facial beauty because we have the breadth of images, both in real life and through the media, to really expand this notion.’

Read the full Q&A here.