designswarm thoughts

I grew up all over the place (Paris, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Canada) and continued to relocate in my adult life (Italy, Holland, now UK) and many of my closest friends have had similar experiences. This got me thinking that the fashionable community of frequent travelers might not necessarily equate the community of frequent re-locators. From children of diplomats or bankers, to anyone who decides to relocate on a whim once they’ve become bored of a city (happens to me a lot), are there any new online or service interactions that can illustrate that granularity of personal experience or cater to those needs? Here are a few “weak signals” I like that could start some thoughts about this area:

We are multicolored is an interested exercise that allows you to draw your own flag based on different flags of countries that have had an impact on you.
I found however that I wanted to include and play around much more than 3 flags. “Where is your home” is question that has become much too broad. Where do you live now? Where have you lived? Where do you call home? are all questions that expand on this idea and could lead to interesting interfaces or visualisations.

What is the difference between relocating somewhere for a few months or a few years? My friend Hayat Benchenaa worked on a service design project for relocation and packing. There’s something interesting here about being able to recreate the idea of “home” quite quickly, before the container full of your belongings arrives. There is potential here in merging some of these ideas with the pre-furnished apartments people rent when staying somewhere for just a few months (very popular in Amsterdam).

Monocle could try catering to re-locators and giving deeper insight into some of the cities they cover instead of skimming through the globe over and over again (the latest one covers Milan in 3 different articles). They could also try catering to women in a different way, other than sticking in awkward fashion ads but that’s another story. There is a market for a magazine that gives insider’s knowledge not only on fashion and politics around the world but also on what makes every city special and different culturally. (Why, for eg. you shouldn’t order a cappucino after 11am in Milan, something re-locators want to know more than people dropping in for a few days of meetings)

Globalisation is a trading concept not a cultural one and there should be services, both online and offline that acknowledge this.

View Larger Map

The interesting thing about traveling and relocating several times in a lifetime lies in the particular nostalgia one has about those places.

In my case, Amsterdam was always about the biking. The wind (or more often than not rain) in your hair, the upright posture, the power (you will never get a car honking at you as there are more bikes than cars), the infinite ways to explore the city, the pride to ride an old and battered beautiful dutch bike that noone would ever want to steal, the sound of the lock as it clings and clangs against the frame, being able to bike back drunk from an event in town, the wind on your back on a downward slope.

In London, things aren’t quite the same for bikers. I look at them go from the second floor of a bus and it looks like an Olympic sport. Aggressive, fast, on gear-less sports bikes, wearing bike helmets (you’d be laughed at for doing that in Amsterdam) and sometimes face masks, it’s just not the same.

So when I left for Amsterdam last week, I had been thinking for months about how I missed my precious bike and how much I wanted to take it back with me to London. Of course it only occurred to me once I got there that it wasn’t the bike I missed, but the biking experience. Something 20 pounds on Easyjet would never get me.

So I came back empty-handed and a bit sad. This was a good reminder that although you can take your friends and your work wherever you go and that global nomadism is the epitome of cool among geeks, there is a vast array of things you will never be able to export out.

And that’s why most people aren’t global nomads. Some places just are too good to leave behind.