The culture of care

I admire products that subtly exude care; a caring about quality. Good parents are like this too - they abide courageously with the good and the bad from their child. In the context of a product, I regard care as responsible attention to detail. Many technology products have trendy feature-sets but they have foibles that were overlooked, ignored or missed. Usable, delightful, fit for purpose, non-abusive material, non-abusive manufacturing process, fairly priced, consistent and delivered in a timely way, these are the attributes of carefully designed products.

I have a Sangean WiFi radio in my home. It's a wonderful radio with rich tones and easy setup. I use it to listen to radio stations from home and BBC on-demand programs. I set up my favorite podcast on Reciva.com (the companion site to most WiFi radios - where you store your favorites). But when I play a podcast, the radio often resets or restarts the podcast 10 minutes into playback. My guess is that Sangean skimped on the buffer memory for streaming. It makes me feel bad about the whole radio but I have resigned myself to streaming the podcast from my PC using the PC-share feature.

Consistency is one of the main factors of care. To maintain intrinsic quality, demonstrates grit and intelligent stubbornness. Apple is one of the brands that comes to mind when I think of a high-level of care and attention to detail. Their success was hard won over a long period; it is not a 'flash-in-the-pan' success. Professional artists and academics require rigorous and consistent quality standards if they are to perform and feel willing to re-purchase. It may seem like you are buying just another laptop when you buy a MacBook but you get professional-grade audio and video playback facilities as standard. The reason Apple computers have an aura of cool is because professionals recognized this quality early on and continued to use these products. People who aspired to be like these artists noticed and followed suit without necessarily understanding the linkage.

To excel at technological choices, takes luck and takes careful tending of the supply chain. I like to think of any purchase as an act of drawing up material from the earth. It is like sucking water through a hose. By taking a plastic bag in Safeway, you are driving the bag supply chain to deliver more to that Safeway store. The bag manufacturer uses oil to produce the bag plastics, package the bulk materials and to deliver the bags to that store. The oil companies literally take the material from the earth. It all sounds obvious but it requires effort and care to think about it repeatedly. Being willfully grateful is the answer. Purchasing is a privilege and should not be indulged mindlessly.

The current downturn in economics can be viewed as a time for the supply-chain and the vacuum-hose of manufacturing to allow the earth to rest. Less money in your pocket means more care with selection of your purchases - by necessity. The same economics drove Toyota Prius sales when petrol prices skyrocketed in the summer of 2008. This change in demand also drives manufacturers to supply goods that are appropriate to a more selective customer base. In reality, lower price goods or high-quality mid-tier goods will sell. For my next post, I plan to research how spending patterns changed in former deep recessions to see how it affected product quality and environmental impact.