Janne Vuorinen – 7th November 2011
Undividualism and its promises.
One day walking in town I saw a group of teenage boys and in a flash it looked like they were all wearing the same clothes. Actually they weren`t, but the differences between them were really minor. It seemed that if one of them had a DC shoes T-shirt someone else would have a DC shoes cap or the actual shoes. Similarly if another one of the boys had a Nike shirt then the others would have Nike shoes or cap. It became apparent that what the boys were wearing was a uniform.
But nowadays it seems we all are wearing uniforms. Clothes are messages. Statements. The thing is it gets harder and harder to actually deviate from the norm. There is always another norm, even outside the norm. An example of this is tattoos, which for me seem like a totally watered down medium. Tattoos used to mean something: that you were a sailor or you had done time. Now every other guy has one. For them, the message in a tattoo seems to say, ‘I am standing outside of the moral codes of today’s world’. It´s not that convincing though if half of the population is saying they are outside.
But there is huge potential in that gap of trying to find a new personality, a new uniform that nobody else is wearing today. Differentiate or die might translate to differentiate or drown in mediocrity. What really opens up this gap is the digital age. Yesterday I read that the population of the world reached 7 billion, and it is easy to do the maths from there. The digital age makes it even more possible to make a profit from even a very simple idea.
One of the things I`ve been working on is an example of this. I thought about the problem of opening a grocery bag. The sort of very thin plastic bags used in supermarkets that stick together and are hard to separate. My idea did not work in real life, but it is still a problem worth addressing for someone who wants to try and crack it. I figured that there would be tens of thousands of shops that might want to relieve their customers of this frustration. I estimated that the manufacture of the product would be around two pounds apiece and that you could probably sell them on for about ten pounds. Although this might not haul in those seven figures you need to impress someone these days, for me it looked like a pretty good salary for the work I would have enjoyed doing anyway.
The door is always open (and today the door is even more wide open) for anyone interested in making small streams into great rivers. All you need to do is keep your eyes open.
