Need to know
29 : 01 : 18

Tokyo – The company’s flagship Beauty Centre has undergone a redesign in collaboration with Japanese architecture practice Nendo.

Now called Shiseido The Store, the showroom has been renovated to focus more on the group’s prestige brands. On the first floor, the retail space, which used to display Shiseido’s range of brands from drugstore to luxury, is now focused on its higher-end Clé de Peau Beauté and Shiseido lines. Another addition will be on the fourth floor, where in February, a new café and event space will open called Shiseido The Tables. Alongside food and drink, customers will be able to attend workshops and events.

The re-investment in the flagship store is particularly geared towards creating a Beauty Temple for international tourists. WWD reports that the store has hired both English- and Chinese-speaking associates to cater for these customers.

US – While net neutrality has become a topic for debate in the US, many consumers are hard pressed to define what it is and why it matters. In a marketing stunt, Burger King aims to make consumers more aware of the issue through the metaphor of a Whopper.

Net neutrality regulates internet service providers to ensure that no website or content provider is favoured over another in terms of speed or access. In the ad, Burger King applies the logic of slow lane or fast lane access to its signature burger, offering customers a ‘slow’ Whopper for £3.50 ($4.99, €4) and ‘hyper-fast’ burger for £17.50 ($24.99, €20).

The advertisement can be seen both as a way for Burger King to capitalise on current headlines and as a means to inform the public about the debate.

How much brands should contribute to social debates that have ethical implications will be explored in our forthcoming Trend Briefing in March. You can buy tickets here.

London – Creative studio FIELD’s latest art series, commissioned by Wired magazine, imagines the invisible force of artificial intelligence.

The long-term research project, System Aesthetics, aims to create visual metaphors for the abstract technologies that are beginning to control every aspect of our lives. The studio aimed to make voice assistance, face hacking, generative adversarial networks, autonomous driving and digital currencies all more tangible through illustrations for Wired magazine, and as animations on FIELD’s website.

‘Increasingly, AI affects all aspects of our world, yet it remains one of the least understood subjects,’ said the studio in a press statement. ‘As ever-more complex data systems are driving our lives, our focus as designers and artists is to create new metaphors that help people, brands and institutions talk about these abstract and intangible things.’

Similarly, design duo Arvid&Marie sought to make autonomous, machine-learning entities more understandable with their project on display at Dutch Design Week 2017.

Despite employment in the UK reaching a record high in 2017, a new survey by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has found that economic insecurity is a widespread problem, with a third (34%) of respondents considering themselves to be ‘just about managing’.

This anxiety about current financial status and future savings is being combatted by fintech start-ups such as micro-savings app Pariti or Wealthsimple, an investment management platform that aims to make Millennials understand their finances better.