The Honda Fit represents the JGE trend in automotive design.In the past year or so, we at Changeist have been talking about the concept of Just Good Enough, or what we call JGE for short. Thinking about JGE stemmed initially from study of how technologies are being developed or modified within the developing world for use there. Where resources such as energy, money or space are constrained, the lowest appropriate level of complexity, cost, functionality, or what have you, is what's needed. Anything else is a luxury--and expendable.

So, for example, why build a $20,000 luxury sedan when all the market needs is something slightly better and safer than a tuk-tuk? Hence, Tata has given us the Nano--the one lahk (100,000 rupees or about $2,500) vehicle that is suited to the needs of a growing sector of Indian society, somewhere below the middle of the pyramid, who need basic transportation that goes from point A to point B, at a minimal cost and with some basic trappings of safety. Pragmatism trumps the need for status in this sort of environment, the polar opposite of much of the developed world, particularly the US.

Or, when you have a house that is 75 square meters, share it with several generations of family, and don't have much privacy, why spend a huge portion of your salary for a desktop PC when your mobile phone does just what you need it to, well enough? If it carries an address book, has adequate basic Internet access for lo-fi text browsing, and allows you to stay in contact with friends and loved ones, then it IS a PC.

Only now, in the face of peaking technological and system complexity as well as against the backdrop of an entrenched economic downturn, is the idea of JGE catching in North America above the level of lower-middle class households. When disposable incomes are high, consumers are drawn to shiny premium features, always looking for a way to trade up to a higher level of product or service to show status. For the last 40 years, Americans bought because they could, even acknowledging economic trade-offs were being made by saving here for a premium service there, or Trading Up as Boston Consulting Group calls it.

Now, in the cold light of economic contraction, attention has turned to JGE: living with just enough money to get by, buying only what you need to be moderately happy or simply get through to the next paycheck. Buying vehicles in terms of tonnage has been replaced by buying ones that can do the basic job with a minimum of necessary styling. Basic coffee in a cup has moved into the space where exotic beans from obscure rift valleys used to sit. Inexpensive, low-end laptops look attractive alongside high-cost, bulky widescreen models. Consumers aren't going out buying expensive mountain or road bikes in the face of rising fuel costs, but basic cruisers are flying off the racks at bike shops.

These are only weak signals at the moment. The vehicles and laptops cited above are signals that have come from elsewhere. Europe and Asia have had low-impact city cars for some time, though R&D efforts to create not only cleaner but lighter vehicles for global markets has given this sector a boost. Lighter weight, cheaper basic laptops emerged in large part from efforts to create affordable devices for developing countries. Intel's competitive actions in the face of the OLPC helped spur OLPC clones for developed markets at just the right time.

Nonetheless these signals are coming in greater numbers, showing a growing demand for products and services that are appropriate for their circumstances and fit available resources in place of premium for the sake of premium. Prime areas of growth for JGE are housing, clothing, household items, personal care, consumer electronics, financial services, food and beverage: all areas where premium services exploded in the past decade, but which are seeing innovations in developing markets that can move to the developed world to suit the growing need in increasingly strapped developed markets.

Implications:

• Slower replacement cycles for products. Consumers will hold on to both costly and everyday products longer, from smartphones to running shoes. Lower cost durability needs to be engineered in, with the potential to upcycle -- use the same platform and renew components as needed.
• Greater interest in the simple choices. All-you-can eat services with high pricetags are set aside for basics at a manageable, transparent cost.
• Greater need to focus points of delight. With most frills stripped away, companies will need to focus on points of delight such as hidden utility to provide consumers with clever functionality at a low cost. Think "virtual" GPS on the iPhone, or fold-up back seats in the Honda Fit.

(Image: Michaela./Flickr)

Lifestreaming seems to be one of the hot new technology memes today, which is interesting considering the topic surfaced some five or more years ago as the consumer-created media model began to emerge-- easy capture + easy publishing = easy authoring of a digital life story in installments. Blogs took on the role of platform for "lifestream of consciousness" for some digital natives, and microblogging added fuel to the fire.

Playing in multiple social networks allowed us to create overlapping (sometimes contradictory) versions of social lifestreams in a passive fashion--the sum total of all of your pokes, friendships, notes, videos, gifts, food fights, support of popular causes, etc. create a somewhat fictional, extroverted lifestream. The recent GPS boomlet has added yet another layer of context, putting our actions on a map, adding space to our otherwise flat digital life stories, showing where we have been, instead of where we should have been.

Now the convergence of all of these platforms and technologies, overlaid with the race to be super-aggregator of all of our open data, means we may not have to actively blog at all: our actions are snaffled up by one of a half-dozen or so lifestreaming "feedsuckers" to continually churn out an updated record of your online and (thanks to location-based services, other people, and data aggregators) offline activities - a true Daily You.

What's the next step? Aggregation seems sorted--we only have to publish in the right format and our feed is collected a dozen times over for use updating status messages across the Web. Once the friction is taking out of publishing (and we're halfway there - down now to only having to crank out 140 characters and hit "send"), the focus will shift to passive collection that requires little or nothing of you. What about an iPhone app that listens to your conversations as you go through the day, plucks out choice phrases and clever thoughts from your chatter and pushes them up to platforms of your choosing--sort of a mobile PA meets biographer. Do you lead a compartmentalized life? Perhaps we'll be able to block access to only certain stories or data points from the view or collection of particular people or services? Why block a whole feed when you can just scrub the offending article? When will our avatars, Miis and other digital representations merge with these streams, flowing into a churning river of personal data?

I actually suspect the technology is already outpacing desire for such services. Doing field research last year among teens, one theme that emerged was a desire to focus on actual friendships versus nurturing a larger number of digital friendships just because they could be collected and contained easily through technology. Broadcasting to everyone may be easy to set up, but it doesn't yet yield any real social value beyond short-term some social capital gained through an exchange of access. As we are now seeing with Twitter being used as a broadcast platform for information in short form, the same scaling back and turn toward utility may occur with the components of lifestreaming--enabling a personal information platform that is focused around particular applications. Parent-to-child, peer-to-peer, directed personal narrowcasts with a purpose. Now that I would invest in.

Imagining the future can be difficult. This isn't to say that we can't imagine it to be whatever we want, full of radical change, sweeping waves of disruption, step-changes in technology, unforeseen behaviors, sci-fi innovation etc.  And given the opportunity to devise scenarios depicting the future, many scenario authors, "professional" and layperson alike, tend to want to go for the gold, taking the opportunity to pack storylines with massive change. As Jamais Cascio wrote a few months back in a meditation on this issue, even futurists create pictures of a future that has "Changed Your Life Forever."

Personas, essentially the personal form of a scenario when used in a futuring context, frequently suffer from overcooking. Whether created by bright and well-meaning designers or strategists or an ad-pitch team looking to convince a client, they often depict lives of the perfect user/consumer, whose average day is an unending sequence of early adopter behaviors or optimal use cases, complete with flawless experiences of new products.

Driving to pick up my children the other day, I was reminded what the future is really going to be like. I happened to catch the top of the hour news on BBC World Service, one of the benefits of satellite radio. As I listened to the top headlines, I was reminded of a conversation with Bruce Sterling some months ago about how strange the world is right now, even without adding any "juice" to the plotline. Our consensus was that it's harder every day to do what we do in foresight, or even in the more creative field of science fiction writing, because, as the saying goes, truth is frequently stranger than fiction these days. In a period of accelerated change, whatever the drivers, we are seeing the unusual play out daily at the moment, right before our eyes.

What's the connection to BBC headlines? Stories about the current price of oil ($145 at the time I heard the news report), an African-American presumptive presidential nominee (Barack Obama), a pocket-sized, touchscreen computing device (iPhone), and a major bank failure (IndyMac), all rolled by, sprinkled alongside the mundane stories of human interest, crime, politics as usual, and other usual suspects of a newscast. Despite a few interesting nuggets and some top headlines that would have sounded outlandish and breathtaking a decade ago, it wasn't a breathtaking litany of staggering disruptions or earthshattering advances in science, and my day wasn't much different than the day or week or month before.

There is a purpose to depicting radical scenarios--they help us decide what we might do in the face of very different circumstances, and therefore be somewhat better prepared should they come to pass. But increasingly the tendency among both their authors and users alike is to veer too far to the absolute - focusing on total disruption without worrying about the legacy relationships, investments, commitments, etc. that are still in place. When this happens, they become the strategic equivalent of escapism. 

While an average day doesn't sell scenarios as well, it does present a normal context against which alternatives, be they product concepts, government policies, or what have you, can be considered. The world remains a mix of the chaotic, surprising, and just plain bland, even if the mix does occasionally get slightly out of balance. We have very, very few moments that "Change Your Life Forever." We have many more where we live through very incremental change, just like today. It's a pretty safe bet that, in the big scheme of things, tomorrow, and probably next year, is going to be to a high degree just like the one described on the radio last week. Painting this picture should be the easy part. The hard part is identifying which of these very incremental points of change in the near term may become major drivers of our world's evolution in the long term.

Lost in the noise of sky-rocketing energy prices, data on the business downturn, and the start of an uncertain summer was news last week that Fedex Kinkos--that hybrid of the world's largest delivery company and your corner copy shop--is changing its name to Fedex Office. According to the company, losing the quirky Kinko's brand reflects a recognition that the company provides more than just copies, delivery and office supplies, and has become, as a company spokesman called it, "...a back office for small businesses and a branch office for medium to large businesses and mobile professionals.''

The name change does indeed reflect the company's true role, albeit about 5 years too late, that Fedex Kinkos is part of the invisible ecosystem of work, alongside Panera, Starbucks, Homewood Suites, Avis and many other scattered pieces of the emerging platform that includes airlines, mobile operators, office supply stores, restaurants, bookstores, and anywhere else today's fluid workers find refuge. It's no longer enough to talk about mobile work, which implies a clear break from "fixed" or in-office work, as a distinct area. As the economy has increasingly shifted toward part-time, contract, service-based work spread over a larger number of "workers," this ideal of the road warrior has really in effect morphed into the work-lifer, for whom  professional work, community activities and private family life are all just interstitial moments, blurred together.

But back to today's headlines and the rebranding of Fedex Office, and the convergence of these two factors presents an interesting opportunity. As the economist Paul Krugman recently pointed out, we are increasingly stranded in suburbia by a combination of high energy prices. I would extend this to add clogged infrastructure and the emerging work-life economy to say we may be reaching an important inflection point where we are increasingly dependent on locally focused, cellular communities of work, constrained by energy costs and inability to move, reliant less and less on the eroding prospects of a traditional work pattern and more and more on local resources and intellectual capital of other professionals nearby--sort of a resilient co-working model.

What are the implications for the companies in the invisible ecosystem described above? For one, Fedex Office should clear out some of those jumbo copiers, or buy out next door's failing coffee shop, and open co-working centers (with childcare) to service the millions of work-lifers who are or will be stranded close by. In the next few years we are bound to see a large part of the workforce who are not able to afford to drive their regional sales territory or make the hour commute to an office or afford assistance at home (hence the childcare), but who want to be connected to each other and need a place to be productive and networked that isn't a coffee shop.

Companies should recognize they are part of this ecosystem and begin to integrate it to provide better, more seamless value to their common users. A few laptop carrels stuck in the corner with a $5-a-minute charge for access won't do it any more. Prepare for the exodus of the modern workforce to the suburbs and actually become the new way to office.

With the rumored release of the next-generation iPhone coming next week has come a spate of sub-rumors about the iconic device carrying true GPS, deeper integration with Google Maps, augmented reality applications and other, similar predictions and fantasies. If even some of it comes to pass, the growing drip-drip of location-based applications that has been sparked by falling GPS prices, increased integration in mobile devices and a steady trickle of mapping technologies could turn into a flood, taking us into a totally new phase of location-related technology interaction.

One outcome of this growth has been the increased amount of location data available, and a new focus on ways to collect, interpret and use that data, giving birth to the new area of reality mining. By using location and movement data, researchers at different institutions and companies are using reality mining to understand everything from the nature of real social networks to preferred modes of transportation to gaining better insights into epidemiology. More than simply looking at limited sets of data from individuals' mobile phones, reality mining looks for patterns in large sets of movements in order to design better solutions for our lives. Of course, group learnings can also be applied to the individual level, delivering everything from more accurately targeted advertising to more timely security responses to threats.

Privacy will be an increasingly important issue as reality mining moves into the commercial/governmental sphere. Questions of tracking individuals, ascertaining information about not only place but mode of behavior ("We know the suspect took a bus to the victim's house, not drove, because of the speed and pattern of his movement, your honor", or "You must have been drunk because of the path you took from here to there") will be raised. Might you get an SMS ad on your mobile offering you discounted energy water because it's hot and you are walking, versus a discount on gas because you have been driving non-stop for a long period of time? Doubtless we'll see both of these examples in the future. For now, just know that you may soon become a Sim in someone else's analysis.

Ed Note:  Two days after writing this, word has come out about a project to track 100,000 mobile users outside the US in a reality mining research project. More will undoubtedly surface.