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.

Businessweek carries an interesting review of some recent tracking data on Web and mobile usage which reveals an increasing divergence in the way Americans use the Web depending on what day of the week it is. In short, the data from mobile tracking firm M:Metrics shows that during the week, we tend to use our PCs for the Web, which makes sense as we are often at work or home or school, in some fixed location with a deeper task at hand. Come the weekend, however, mobile Web usage spikes as we increasingly use mobile data connections to find a movie, search for a yard sale, look at an apartment, or all of the personal/social things we do on weekends.

The breakdown appears to be between mandatory and discretionary actions: what we have to do, versus what we want to do. The change has likely been fueled by the larger numbers of Web-friendlier smartphones we carry over from our day jobs into our private lives. We are able to bring more powerful tools with us as we go about our domestic chores and personal errands, pointing the way to a new set of functions both for the devices we carry, and the sites we visit.

Mobilizing the discretionary Web, on sites such as the popular Craigslist, which sees a big spike on weekends from mobile traffic, or sites of major retailers, such as grocery stores, big box retailers (imagine a mobile-optimized Ikea site, complete with in-store turn-by-turn location-based functionality and QR codes! It could turn a shopping nightmare into an in-store expedition.), or movie theatre or restaurant chains would speed the growth in the so-called "weekend Web".

Smartphone makers continue to adapt toward consumer markets, adding better cameras, GPS, and better screens but haven't yet begun to add more applications that recognize this difference in behavior between work and play. For the moment, the focus is on body color, sleeker lines and maybe media playback. The next step is adding content and applications that actually fit with the way we live our lives, not just in the office, but when we relax and enjoy time with family and friends.

Ever wonder how the future is proactively created? One great example of applying an understanding of human behavior and interaction to development of future products--so that new products meet emerging needs just at the right moment in the near future--is featured prominently in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. The Times followed Nokia's Jan Chipchase, Duncan Burns and other designers from the company as they spent time in Accra, Ghana observing and gently interrogating the everyday lives of people in a case-study developing market, and probing their reactions to designs that pair fresh insights about their use of communication technology with equally fresh prototypes.

Chipchase and his colleagues at Nokia, some of whom I have had the pleasure of working with, do a fantastic job of bringing these two critical streams--emerging behaviors and emerging technology--together at just the right time, or you might say just in time. His anthropologist, designer and ethnographer peers in many similar companies are also working diligently to better understand this process, people, and methods to create the future as and when it's needed, not simply to build their own version and push it out the door, hoping consumers' behaviors can be force fit to a design. Fortunately, these ideas and practices are spreading, and the benefits are beginning to be measurable in better lives, better opportunities, and success for the companies who see the light, as the article describes.

I had originally planned to write this piece about the backgrounding of technology in my own life, when I came across an article in the Guardian today about changes in the "market basket" used by the British Office of National Statistics (ONS) to calculate the cost of living in that country. Don't worry, I'll come back to my own situation in a minute.

Every month, the ONS examines the existing basket of goods and services to see if the items it includes properly reflects the economic lives of average consumers. About once a year, out-of-date items get tossed out in favor of those that better reflect the zeitgeist. For example, this year, the cost of fruit smoothies and muffins are now counted in the index, in favor of "stubbies" or short bottles of beer. Britons, surrounded in most high streets by newish cafes, are grabbing more bottled smoothies on the go, and picking up fewer packs of small beer bottles to drink in front of the television. Where does technology come into this picture? In a number of places: in the case of microwave ovens, their cost has fallen so much as to make them less valuable as indicators. Likewise, TV repair no longer counts because fewer people are taking their sets, mostly digital, in for a fix: with the decline of analog devices, repair services decline as well. It's cheaper to buy a TV one than get one fixed, an increasingly common situation with a lot of household technology.

Among the other casualties have been 35mm film cameras, which are being replaced by digital point-and-shoot devices and digital SLRs. Manual steering locks for cars are out, having been sidelined by automatic car locking devices. Also, thankfully, CD singles are out, reflecting the current hegemony of downloaded MP3s. One relic remains, though. CDs of so-called classic albums are still in. Some parts of the past we are reluctant to shed, sadly.

My own personal household technology revelation came when I purchased a replacement heart monitor watch last week: I realized not only was it my third in four years, it was the fourth in the household, and the 4th GPS-capable device I own (only one of which I actually use for location-finding). I am a reasonably early adopter, but not to the point of pathology. However, this moment of realization reminded me of a similar mental inventories in the past several years when I realized I had four or five devices capable of playing MP3s (now that's up to eight or nine, counting retired mobile phones), and before that realizing I had six or seven camera-bearing objects and five or six items capable of playing CDs.

The point is these technological functions creep into the household, sneaking in onboard products in which they may not be the main function. The cost of adding MP3, cameras, GPS, wireless heart monitoring, etc. has fallen to such a point with each of these "new" technologies that they just come as afterthoughts. And almost as quickly, they end up in desk drawers, ziplock bags, old briefcases, etc. Their cheapness creates a small scrapyard in my house of dormant technology, so cheap in fact I can afford to give it to the kids or just toss it out.

So, while we still cling to models that show a fairly linear conveyor belt of products hitting early adopters, then fast followers, then laggards, then the dollar store, we may need to reconsider the dynamics of technology penetration into homes. It may not be a question of convergence or fragmentation of functions, products and services, but a fairly steady rainfall of low-level tech into our lives, often riding along like a parasite on some other purchase. 
 

Experientia's Putting People First today points to an article in the Boston Globe about the growing interest among technology developers in creating products that appeal to women. The article points to big players such as Nokia and Microsoft as those making a research investment in creating products and services that address not only the stylistic interests of women but also their social preferences and cognitive patterns.

The big push by these companies and others is to get beyond what one female salesperson I spoke with in an electronics store derisively called the "shrink it and pink it" mentality of developing technology for women (while restocking a section of small, pink MP3 players). One interesting breakthrough is that Nokia, Microsoft et al are beginning understand that technology designed by (predominantly) male engineers and developers contain architectures and processes that reflect the mindset of the designer (see Michele Bowman's piece about mobile phone selection here to witness the frustration). As such they don't necessarily reflect the values, behaviors or tastes of what is increasingly the majority of the tech purchasing public in the US.

Nokia's Tera Ojanperä puts a finger on the issue exactly, saying it isn't about "shrink and pink," but about humanizing the products and services that are offered, making them more social. In general it can probably be said that the sharper focus on the social aspects of technology, greater application of people-centered design strategies, and the improvements that are being made in some areas in usability are all helping to draw women to the cash register and makes them happier, more productive, more satisfied customers, which in turn encourages more of the same approach.

The long-term implication for consumer technologies is broader application of visual, cooperative/social, relational values and characteristics in new products and services. It may also mean a longer-term shift in the information processing patterns of male users as younger consumer adapt to these rebalanced cognitive maps and processes; hierarchies, collections, "buckets," may fade as information navigation metaphors over time.