Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at language, education, and everything else under the sun. I’m Joel, linguist and professional slacker. This week, we're getting localized.
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Amazon recently expanded the product line for its Echo Dot system of smart devices with a pair of smart-speakers aimed at kids. There are a lot of reasons why this is both a good and bad idea. On the one hand, smart speakers and digital assistants have an enormous potential for allowing children to direct their own learning. On the other, these smart speakers are always-on devices, meaning that the software is always listening and that has significant privacy implications. All that being said, what I want to talk about is design and marketing.
I've been reading Matt Alt's Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World. One of its central arguments is that the introduction of "kawaii" into the pop-culture lexicon through video games, anime, and manga has been a long process, the effects of which are only now beginning to be visible in the pop-culture landscape. By and large, these effects take the form of new tropes and ideas that transfer from Japanese culture to English and English-adjacent cultures worldwide, one such concept being the idea that it is okay for products to be designed to be "kawaii."
Take, for example, pagers: in the 1990s, pagers were a way for doctors and other businessmen to stay in constant contact with their staff or office. In Japan, however, the technology was quickly appropriated by teenage girls who began to use the alphanumeric characters to quickly communicate in ways not conceived of by the device makers. Said device makers responded by making new devices whose form-factor was radically different from the black and beige rectangles worn by salarymen. Instead, they came in a range of colors and shapes, perfect for slipping into and out of a stylish handbag.
This kind of call-and-response between manufacturer and customer is a natural part of the marketplace. What was different was the "cute" factor. Consider the landline telephone. By the 1980s telephone technology was so well established manufacturers began playing with form factors as a way of gaining new customers or retaining old ones. My friend got a football phone with his Sports Illustrated subscription. Another friend had an as-seen-on-t.v. lip phone. But these were not what you would call cute. Fun, sure. Funny? Maybe. But cute? Not really.
And so we come back to Amazon's kid-friendly smart speakers. The initial iteration takes the form of a panda and a tiger. They have soft, rounded edges, big friendly (painted-on) eyes, and are, generally cute. A design that may never have happened had Japan's notion of kawaii not made its way west.
So, prompted by all this, I have been wondering what a smart speaker designed in Japan for Japanese people would look like. Or what shape an Indian smart speaker designed for Indian people would take. And so on. At the moment, the big four all have a range of smart devices and appliances, designed to be paired with their proprietary digital assistants. Apple has Siri and the HomePod. Amazon has Alexa and a whole range of speakers. Google has, er, Google and a bunch of devices. And Microsoft has Cortana and...I don't actually know anymore. And, right now, all these devices look like living room accessories, much like pagers all looked like business devices. Which makes sense as the technologies are still new and the marketing focus is on getting people to buy one or more of the devices.
I expect that to begin changing soon; I expect that we'll begin to see devices specifically targeting different rooms of the house with different key features - nightlight for the bedroom, screen for the kitchen, waterproofing for the bathroom. Indeed, Amazon, at least, has already begun testing some of these features in their designs. But what happens after that? My expectation and my hope is that we begin to see a lot more localization*.
As the manufacturing of smart devices get ever cheaper, I hope we begin to see designs that better match the culture where the device is sold. In an increasingly connected world, it is a pity that everything looks the same when the potential for an ever-growing range of physical shells for our communication tools is possible. Some of this has already begun - in Japan, LINE, a texting and communication app, has released their own speakers. They're very kawaii. Of course, LINE's first licensed tie-in for their speaker is the Minions. The more things change, the more everything looks the same, I guess.
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Until next time, stay safe, stay sane. Learn something.
Joel
*Software localization is a whole other topic: at the moment, my Alexa device works a lot better when connected to the English-based Amazon U.S. When I switch it over to Japanese and Amazon Japan, the number of useful functions decreases dramatically. I really just want to be able to ask when the next train is leaving!