How to thrive in the we-economy

Thriving in a we-economy

The products that drove the industrial economy are becoming commodities: They have matured to the point where it’s hard and expensive to squeeze additional value from them. Instead, new value and growth now comes from connecting and combining technologies to create broader solutions, starting from the customer’s perspective.

Industrial products were mass-produced, one-size-fits-all. Now, value is increasingly created for specific customers in a specific context, here and now.

Rather than thinking in terms of standalone products, customers will buy devices and services that fit together with all the other stuff they are using – and the value they derive emerges from the interaction between large numbers of companies, often from very different sectors. Just consider how many providers are involved and coordinated to enable the services that are available on a smartphone.  

In the global market place, pressure to deliver more for less is as high as ever, and as we go forward, the demand for efficiency will only increase because of growing concerns about the environment and the tightening supplies of natural resources and energy.

Computers and connectivity are making it cheaper to coordinate and orchestrate transactions widely, with great precision and efficiency.

In all industries, products are digitized, networked, and equipped with sensors. They are exchanging data and coordinating, to compose solutions that are adapted to individual and local demands – but drawing on global networks and a wide variety of resources – including input from users themselves.

A new approach to meet new conditions

To thrive under these new conditions, companies need a new approach to business and value creation.

The main characteristic is a shift from a ME perspective towards a WE perspective.

This means seeing yourself as part of a much wider set of stakeholders, and understanding that your success depends on the success of all others involved in creating a common solution.

Taking a we-perspective means realizing that you cannot create complex solutions alone, and that opening to co-creation with other stakeholders, including users, will give you access to greater insight at a lower cost.

Thus, the we-approach is one of interaction, collaboration and interdependence.

This in turns implies that businesses need to rethink the way they organize value creation.         

- Focus shifts towards processes and applications, rather than providing finished products. Design is largely about creating and contributing to tools, services, platforms and systems that make it easy for a wide range of participants to join and contribute to creating the results they each want.

- It’s a participatory economy, based on a much deeper interaction action between producers and consumers. The traditional, industrial-era division of roles and responsibilities between suppliers, manufacturers, users, and customers are blurred. 

- Openness and sharing is a prerequisite for developing and operating a We- economy business concept. However, when knowledge and resources are shared, the ownership, rights and profits from activities are not so straightforward.

- The motivation to contribute knowledge, effort and other resources is not purely economic. Participants may equally be driven by the desire for recognition, by professional interest, social interaction or a wish to help others. Concerns about sustainability, minimizing the waste of resources and the environment in general are also important as motivation.

- Leadership and decision-making happens across organizational boundaries in networks, that can include not only the individual company's own employees, but also workers from other enterprises, volunteers, public servants, users, suppliers and customers.

- With less central authority or ownership, control of the process is replaced by influence.

- The connection between efforts and pay-off is less direct, and investments must be seen in a wider and longer-term perspective when you are contributing to make the ecosystem, which you are ultimately dependent on, thrive.

- A different set of skills is required. The traditional, rather passive and reproducing role of workers and consumers in the industrial age, need to change towards more personal initiative, assuming responsibility, sharing, communicating and creating. 

Elements of a new normal.

Interestingly, these characteristics are very visible in a number of new and often overlapping approaches to business, which have had considerable success and attention recently.

The sharing economy matches idle resources with needs. Access to use is more important the individual ownership Instead.

The maker movement is democratizing innovation and making it possible for virtually anyone to develop, manufacture and sell products.

Co-creation and broader participation in the development and production of solutions is possible in digital networks

The circular economy sees business as an ecosystem where everything and everyone are ultimately interrelated and interdependent.

Social enterprises work to make services and goods accessible to as many people as possible – rather than maximizing profits.

A lot of experimentation is going on, and not all companies and business models will have staying power. However, looking at the big picture, it’s hard to imagine that elements of these approaches will not become part of the new normal way of doing business.

Free is a lie - you pay and you are sold

Free is lie, says Aral Balkan in his speech at London RSA. He points out the many ways in which you lose privacy or in which the personal information you leave behind by using free internet services creates massive businesses, and makes it easier to target you as a consumer. 
It's the usual story, but told with gusto. We know it all too well. 
Balkan is trying to create an alternative web service that does not take your private info. A long shot, it seems.

My talk at Oui-share fest in Paris

The video from my talk at the Ouishare Fest in Paris this summer is now online:
How the collaborative economy challenges existing businesses. What are the challenges that companies face if they want to engage in the sharing economy? What tools and methods might make it less risky and more "normal" for a business to collaborate more widely?

The new normal in business: Going from product to platforms and processes

Platforms and processes, rather than products, will become the focus of new business creation as we move forward. The main characteristic of a handful of new trends in business – Collaborative consumption, Sharing, the Maker movement and the Circular economy – is that the value creation is less about adding some new feature to a product. Instead, the appeal of these models is that they can deliver more value for less by involving a number of stakeholders, including the users, in co-creating solutions. What’s innovative, and what distinguishes successful companies in this type of economy, is their ability to create well-working platforms that enable a wide set of actors to participate.

Conventional hotel chains like Hilton or Intercontinental have built their business over decades by owning and operating hotels. Now, in just a few years, Airbnb has created a service that rivals them in size, by coordinating that a great number of private persons can rent out rooms to others. Likewise, the large media companies used to be broadcasters that would send the same ready-made content to millions of viewers. Now, 7 of the top ten global websites are services based on content created by the users. Sites like Facebook, Wikipedia and Twitter do not produce content, they operate platforms that make it easy for millions of users to exchange the information they need.

Even producers of physical devices need to start focusing on platforms and processes, because increasingly, this is where they can create value for their users. Take as an example a manufacturer of Digital SLR cameras. SLR cameras have fallen drastically in price in recent years, while at the same time, the quality and features offered by companies have become very similar. Technically, the difference between Canon, Nike, Olympus or Sony is hard to tell.  In short, cameras have become commodities, mainly competing on price – which is not a very attractive game for a manufacturer to play. New features or marginal technical improvements in image quality are getting harder and more expensive to develop – even if they hardly can fetch a higher price.

The superstructure

Instead a company can try to improve the user’s experience by building services and processes, for instance by creating sites that teach users to take better pictures, galleries and competitions that allow users to show off their photos and be inspired by others, forums where users can help each other with tips and tricks, or platforms that allow users to share equipment or collaborate on projects.

One could think of these processes as a virtual ”superstructure”, which runs on top of the physical product. For companies, it is typically a less expensive way to improve the value of its solution to users, and often it creates a more engaged and loyal relationship to customers.

The same approach can be used for almost any object or device – whether it’s pharmaceuticals, sporting goods or DIY tools. It’s likely that for many devices there will be no point in trying to distinguish between the physical product and its virtual superstructure – they become an integrated solution. Already products like smart phones make no sense without all the apps and services that run on it. The same will be true for 3D printers, cars, thermostats, running shoes…

In some cases, creating a popular superstructure, can allow a company to change its status from being one among a number of other providers of equipment to becoming an integrator, operating a platform, where many others companies and their customers also go to create solutions. Once again, Apple’s app-store is an obvious example.

Designing tools for participation

From a design perspective, this means that focus moves from designing finished products, to designing tools that allow customers to participate and contribute to creating a solution, which fits exactly to the individual users’ context.

This is already evident in the many websites that enable users to customize the products they order. Cars, furniture, glasses and shoes have been modularized, so customers can pick and choose the combinations of features, colors and materials they prefer. This makes the product much more valuable to the customer, indicating that making the interfaces for participation effective and easy to use is an important part of the overall design of what the company offers.

Such mass customization is at one end of the spectrum of involving users in value creation. At the other end are much more open-ended systems for 3D printing, which allow users to download CAD drawings and remix and redraw objects completely before printing them out.

It seems likely that users will increasingly expect and demand the option of co-creating ever more details of the objects they use – at least those objects that they are most engaged in or dependent on.

User-driven innovation is another example of the power of creating platforms and services rather than just physical objects. The toymaker LEGO very deliberately works to engage its users in co-creating new products – and in the process, the platforms for involving users have become extensions of the LEGO experience. LEGO Cusoo is an example; it’s a website, where users can show off their constructions, and where they can vote for the constructions that they would like to see as official LEGO sets. If a design gets more than 10.000 supports, LEGO will start the process of developing it into an official product, and if it makes it to the market, the designer will receive a percentage of the revenues.

Traditional roles are blurring

One way of describing the shift in approach is that companies, which have been providing solutions to you and for you, will move to solutions created with you and by you. This goes for customized physical products as well as services like healthcare, education, banking or travelling.

Although it’s not as if customers are taking over completely and starting to build everything themselves, it’s clearly very different than the strict division of roles and responsibilities between providers and users, that were the norm in the traditional industrial society. Those old lines are blurring, as consumers become participants and co-creators.

This in turn has implications for styles of management. The company loses control of the process and the outcome, when solutions emerge in the interaction among a number of different stakeholders on a platform

Managers cannot hand out top-down commands, because the contributors to a project may be from different organizations – or they can be customers or volunteers. The company can influence, but not control, and leadership becomes a matter of motivating others by the strength of your vision.

The shift of roles can be challenging, because it requires a rethinking of how you see yourself contributing value – whether as a company or as a person. In the co-creation paradigm, being an expert is not about knowing all the facts or being able to come up with solutions yourself. Rather, expertise can be in enabling the solution to emerge, by bringing together the right people and resources. Thus , the teacher is not just an expert in the subject, but rather in making learning happen. The doctor is not just an expert in disease, but in supporting health.

Procter and Gamble famously changed the approach of their huge internal product-development labs from “research and develop”, to “connect and develop”.

It’s not just about money

Interestingly, the collaborative economy is not just about money. For the company that operates the platform or sells products that work with it, money may be what drives the business. But for other stakeholders, there can be other motivations for participating than money. Users and volunteers can contribute to get recognition and status, to help each other, because they find it interesting – or because they enjoy the social interaction. It’s an important point that these values can be as important as money in making the interaction work productively.

From ME to WE-thinking

The most challenging part of moving to platforms for co-creation may be the deeper change in mindset that it requires: From a ME to a WE perspective.

Generally, the past decades have been an era of ME thinking. There has been an emphasis on individual freedom and achievement. Winning the competition against everyone else was seen as the way to grow.

The Me-thinking appears increasingly problematic and un-suited for a world that is becoming intensely connected and interdependent.

Instead it has getting easier and more efficient to develop and seek solutions by working with others, and in the process accepting that one’s own success depends on the success of everyone else in the system. WE-thinking is about realizing that our fate is shared.

WE-thinking requires trust. To cooperate and share we need transparency, we need better tools for assessing risk, we need to be able to retaliate if others cheat or free-ride, we need new ways of sharing ownership and benefits. For the WE-economy to become the new normal it needs to be operational for regular, established companies. Businesses may see the potential in opening up, but they will be very reluctant to do so unless there are tools in place, that make sharing and collaborating more predictable and reliable.

Obviously, all of this is not an absolute shift. We will still be competing, we will still be thinking about our own interests, we will still want to be able to control and own. But the opportunities in thinking more in terms of WE are growing as technology connects us, and as the increasing pressure from a growing population on a finite planet makes it clear that ME-thinking will only exhaust the available resources for all of us.

Jeremy Rifkin on an economy where energy, information and things cost next to nothing

Jeremy Rifkin’s latest book ”The zero marginal cost society” looks at how the economy could change as an increasing part of what we consume is produced in ways, where the marginal cost is near zero. We know that once a piece of information has been produced, it can be copied and distributed for nearly free.

Jeremy Rifkin argues that the same logic will apply to 3D printed physical objects and to renewable energy.

It will be expensive to establish the infrastructure and the machinery for producing and delivering, and it will take investments to design and create the first version of a product – but from there on, all the following copies are essentially free.

As Rifkin writes:

”Like the communications internet where the up-front costs of establishing the infrastructure were considerable, but the marginal cost of producing and distributing information is negligible, the up-front costs of establishing an energy internet are likewise significant, but the marginal cost of producing each unit of solar and wind power is nearly zero. Renewable energy, like information, is nearly free after accounting for the fixed costs of research, development, and deployment”.

Obviously, this completely changes the conventional logic in business:

”As more and more of the foods and services that make up the economic life of society edge towards near zero marginal cost and become almost free, the capitalist market will continue to shrink into more narrow niches where profit-making enterprises survive only at the edges of the economy”, Rifkin writes.

One consequence of this is that the need for human labor to reproduce will be very limited. To be of use, you must create variety and novelty – you can’t make money on the second item.

A lot of people will find it very hard to find employment or earn an income – yet we will live in an era of abundance:

”When the exchange value of producing additional units of a good or service is nearly zero, it means that scarcity has been replaced by abundance. Exchange value becomes useless because everyone can secure much of what they need without having pay for it. The products and service have use and share value but no longer have exchange value”.

In my opinion, Rifkin tends to gloss over the risk of creating an economy in which a very small group of people own the infrastructure, and have the capital and intellectual resources to operate the machinery that delivers at near zero cost. Business will need VERY large-scale operation to get a return on their investment, when every transaction is so small – so the monopoly tendencies are extremely strong.

Only the superstars will be able to make money by creating designs that are so novel, that everyone will want to use them for a small fee.

Rifkin acknowledges the risk, but only in a sketchy way:

”Whether the new potential inherent in the Internet of things infrastructure can be realized will be determined by who finances the platform”.

”The prospect of a new economic infrastructure and paradigm that can reduce marginal costs to near zero makes the private firm, whose very existence depends on sufficient margins to make a profit, less viable. Cooperatives are the only business model that will work in a near zero marginal cost society”.

The solution he points to is cooperatives – however, there’s not much in terms of description of what a plausible type of cooperative. He does link the zero margin cost logic to the explosion of the ”collaborative economy” with sharing, makers, open source and social entrepreneurs exchanging value in new ways.

And I completely agree, that this is perhaps the most important trend pointing the way to an economic model for the 21st. Century.

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship to Rifkin. He has a particular knack for sensing new major shifts in the way our societies operate long before most others. He’s very good at big picture thinking, and when he is at his best, he really delivers great vision and insight.

I just wish he wasn’t so pre-occupied with promoting himself and making sure we all understand his magnitude.

Luckily, if you want a quick overview, there’s an excellent podcast where Jeremy Rifkin explains hisideas in a conversation with Paul Saffo. In fact, his ideas seem a lot crisper in this hour-long talk than in the book, which in sections tends to get overly detailed, and to spread out in too many directions.

I strongly recommend starting out with the podcast.

http://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/podcast/jeremy-rifkin-are-we-moving-capitalist-collaborative-economy-4914

SfG Newsletter: Consumer insights in emerging markets

-->

How do you understand customers in places that are very different from your home-market? Brilliant companies like Toyota, MacDonalds and Danish fashion company IC-companies have failed to connect to the Chinese consumers, thinking that they could simply push the same products that were successfull in the West.

The latest newsletter from the ”Suitable for Growth” project at the Universe Foundation focuses on how to collect market insights in emerging markets, for instance by using ethnographic observations and organizing insights in ”Customer journey maps”.

It also offers lots of entertaining examples of cultural quirks and surprises collected in China. And it features a rare insight into how Haier, the Chinese white goods manfuacturer, uses customer understanding as its core competitive advantage.

It's obvious - if you can see it

-->

Jan Chipchase is probably the worlds leading consumer anthropologist. He has spent decades travelling the world doing consumer research for companies like Nokia, diving deep into local cultures, following consumers in their homes and at work.

In his book ”Hidden in plain sight”, Chipchase presents his methods and how companies use his observations to win customers, even in the most foreign markets and cultures.

His website is a wonderful and ever-changing collection of his snapshots and observation from criss crossing the world – China, Libya, Japan, Afghanistan... -   in search of insights that can lead to better products.

It’s obvious: If you want to create suitable products, you need to know your customers well.

Jan Chipchase is probably the worlds leading consumer anthropologist. He has spent decades travelling the world doing consumer research for companies like Nokia, diving deep into local cultures, following consumers in their homes and at work. Today he is head of consumer insight at Frog, a leading American design company.

In his new book ”Hidden in plain sight”, Chipchase presents his methods and how companies use his observations to win customers, even in the most foreign markets and cultures.

The inspiration that Jan Chipchase collects is anything but linear and direct. Seeing a child by the roadside in Ho Chi Minh City selling gasoline to scooter drivers from a large bottle placed on a stack of bricks, and using a simple plastic hose to fill the scooters’ fuel tank, Chipchase realizes that this is the absolute minimum of what a gas station can be.

He uses the observation to start thinking about what a gas station would be like if it didn’t even sell gasoline. In an age of electrical cars, which can charged when people park at home or at their job, what services remain for the gas stations to deliver: bathrooms, food, car service, picking up parcels? How do gas stations make a difference when the gas is gone?

Building trust

Noticing that in some places, consumers making a cup of tea will sniff the milk before they pour it into the cup, Chipchase starts wondering about the many ways that companies need to build trust in their brand by allowing users to ”sniff the milk” before they buy.

How to signal trust, reliability, status varies tremendously between cultures – and understanding how to meet the locate requirements and style of communicating quality is crucial – for instance, if you are selling milk, chicken or beer in China.

A Chinese example of building trust is the use of carpet mats in elevators, and seat coverings in taxis with the current day of the week printed on them – a way to show customers that this is a clean place.

One reason why Ebay has failed, but Taobao has succeeded in China, is that Taobao allows customers to put the payment into an escrow account at Taobao. Sellers know that the money has been deposited, but it will only be released, when the customer has received the goods and is satisfied with them.

No-one wants to be seen as disabled

A particularly interesting case, which Chipchase describes in his book, is the process, Nokia went through when it considered whether to create a handset specifically suited for illiterate users in developing countries.

Nokia has a very strong brand in developing and emerging markets. Of the more than a quarter of a billion phones it sells annually, a large part are the simplest and cheapest model, and millions of them are sold to people who are illiterate.

Chipchase and his colleagues did extensive research into how illiterate people use phones and services such as texting or receiving information. They realized that illiterates do not want to carry a phone, which clearly signals that they have no education. People have invented all sorts of work-arounds that allow them to use the phone despite not knowing letters and numbers, so for them, the most important factor was that the phone is cheap and reliable.

The surprising conclusion for Nokia was, that it would be better to continue selling one, really cheap phone, rather than developing and marketing a new model, which would inevitably be more expensive.

Therefore, Nokia decided to focus its efforts on designing little changes to the general interface that could help the illiterate.

Go out and live with people

A lot of Chipchase’s work has been helping Western companies understand what consumers in the emerging markets become willing to pay for as their buying power increases.

He repeatedly emphasizes that ”low-income people are in fact some of the worlds toughest customers. Because they have to make every rupee count, they can least afford to buy poorly designed products”.

”Hidden in plain sight” is also a bit of a manual. Chipchase describes how he and his teams start their scouting in a new location by finding local helpers – ”fixers” – often students, who can take them for tours, explain local quirks and set up meetings in private homes and companies.

Rather than staying at a hotel, Chipchase prefers renting a house for the whole team to live in, and he recommends renting bikes, to get a closer feel for the city’s flow and life. He likes to wake up early to observe the city coming to life; unfolding the functions, rituals and habits of everyday life.

Barbershops are one of the places he visits to get into conversations that go deeper than an outside observation. He confesses, that he has managed to take a shave twice in a day, just to meet more people.

It’s all about looking at the world with a systematically open and curious mind: Visiting people in their homes, sneaking a peek in their refrigerator and bathroom, joining them on their commute to work, studying what they carry in their pockets and bags, and asking why they carry it.  Weeks of observations lead to a better sense of how people consume, in order to make their lives more convenient and maintain the social status they strive to express: whether it be through the use of mobile phones, banking services or deodorant and toothpaste.

In Bangkok, Chipchase found a shop selling false braces for teeth. The cheap braces obviously were not working, but they were worn by people who wanted to signal that they had the means to have their teeth straightened.

Find a problem and fix it

It becomes clear from the many examples in the book how blockbuster products and service have emerged, because someone realized, that there was an everyday problem, which could be fixed – but which, as the title of the book has it, had been hidden in plain sight.

A simple insight into how users behave allows designers to come up with improvements – big or small: Google understood that we often forget to attach files when we mail others, so in Gmail, if you use the word ”attach” in your message, and you don’t attach a file, the system will ask if you want to attach a file, before sending.

What’s suitable for customers is not always obvious, there is any number of ever-changing  dimensions and variables to consider and weigh against each other. Jan Chipchase’s book will give readers a good introduction to some methods that can business choose with more precision.

Chipchase'sblog, future perfect, is a treasure trove of funny and thought provoking observations from around the world.

Nudging / manipulation

Nudging is about presenting choices in a way that makes people do what you want them to – while still leaving them with the freedom to choose for themselves.
One way of nudging is setting the default, you present people with options, but one of them has been pre-chosen. Most of us will simply accept the default.

This has been used to make school kids make more healthy choices in canteens – but the same mechanism can obviously also be used to make consumers spend more than they would otherwise. 

Here’s an example, from Disney in Orlando. It’s always a bit of a hassle to calculate tips in the US, but this restaurant helps you by calculating the amount for you. They have two suggestions: 18% and 20%. All you need to do is fill in the amount.
…But what happened to 15%? As long as I can remember, 15% was the norm. Now, if you want to pay 15% you are not normal, in fact it really sticks out that you are trying to go against a norm that you have been presented with.
Personally, I get really stubborn when I sense that I’m being manipulated. It’s no longer a friendly transaction, when you sense that the other party is trying to trick you.
They got 15%.

Smarter innovation project at the Universe Foundation

At the Universe Foundation, where I work, we are just starting up a new project in collaboration with the Danish Industrial Foundation – it’s called SMART.

The idea is to assist and follow a handful of Danish 5 medium sized companies as they try to lower their costs and prices in order to adapt to an increasing pressure on prices in the European market.

What’s important is that the reduction in cost should not cause a reduction in utility and satsifaction for the end-user. Ideally, we are looking for ways to increase the experience quality in new wasy that do not add cost.

From our research over the past year with “suitable” innovation in Shanghai and with “frugal solutions” in India and in the West, we have learned that it’s very hard for companies to move downwards in prices – particularly for established companies, that are operating in the main export markets in Europe, where price used to be less of an issue.

We are trying hard to lower the threshold for the companies to get started, so were are specifically not attempting radical innovation, but rather applying a systematic, incremental approach of understanding customers needs exactly and modifying products to deliver just the utility and quality that really matters to end-users.

We have just launched a website for the project at: www.smarterinnovation.org

Frugal solutions – Our brief new pamphlet

At the Universe Foundation we've just published a short, easy to read pamphlet which describes why we see a need for companies to develop more "frugal solutions".

It also features  a toolbox of methods that companies may consider if they want to try lowering prices without comprising the utility for end-users. 

You can download it here.

Obviously, there’s an extensive website as well.

In English - and in Danish

Watch Google making associations

This is mesmerizing. It's like seeing how Google's image search makes associations to find pictures that look like eachother. By following the variations the artist, Dina Kelberman, makes this great and When You've surprising trail of random images.

 

Afterwards, have a look at this piece, also by Dina Kelberman, and similar in approach: All kinds of little animations from the web with smoke and fire.

Audio interview with Michiel Schwarz, co-author of Sustainism

I reviewed Michiel Schwarz and Joost Elffers book "Sustainism is the new modernism" for the Danish newspaper Politiken. The review is in Danish, but I also did a telephone interview with Michiel Schwarz in which he talks about some of ideas behind the book, and why they chose to coin a new word – sustainism – and design new icons in order to describe the characteristics of the future.

The interview lasts 14 minutes.

Insights from IDEO

Anyone interested in innovation can probably find inspiration in the brief online newsletter, Patterns, which IDEO publishes. It's a great place to stay updated on the latest buzzwords. Most recent issue is about Gamification, other recent topics were "Serve the people", "Social media bolstering big brands" and "Care and repair".

Lots of good stuff, easily accessible.

Only in India - funny, real, very Indian

I love sites like "Only in India": funny, very particular, and somehow a great love for the subject shines through.

The Only in India blog is filled with photos of the weird ways Indians cope with being in India. Jugaad innovation – bottom up. Like this tuk-tuk driver and his hand free mobile phone solution...

This is colossal!

This is the most interesting and entertaining site I’ve come across in quite a while - thisiscolossal.com. Colossal presents art that is very close to my liking: modern, colorful, high tech, quirky, fun, beautiful. There’s just a lot of great stuff, day after day.

Colossal is the project of Christopher Jobson – based in Chicago. This is how he presents the site himself:

”I like to describe Colossal as a blog that explores the intersection of art, design, and physical craft. I enjoy artwork that is tactile, physical and non-digital in nature, especially sculptural work and installations that use impossible numbers of components, or sequences in a process. During the course of a week you’ll find roughly 30 posts on photography, design, animation, painting, installation art, architecture, drawing and street art. I share things that I feel are accessible to everyone, requiring little explanation or theory, so in that sense, I hope people not involved directly in the arts can also find this site engaging”.