Nascentdesign - Italian Brand AgencyNascentdesign - Italian Brand Agency
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The Brand Dispatch

April 2023

Ikea's ramadan

This year, the Swedish brand is also participating in Ramadan.  It does so by incentivizing Muslim families to come together and gather after fasting in an increasingly cozy and curated atmosphere.


Under the title "break the fast in style," IKEA is offering a line of accessories and serving bowls, Gokvalla, inspired by Blue Mosque motifs.


But IKEA's focus on the holy month also lands on TV. Al-Futtaim IKEA, a leading Swedish furniture retailer in the UAE, has launched, in partnership with Gray Dubai, a new campaign dedicated to celebrating memorable moments for families during Ramadan.


The campaign was introduced with an emotional and moving commercial that emphasizes the importance of family ties and cultural and religious traditions. Equality, diversity and inclusion are among the core principles on which IKEA has built its reputation and developed its storytelling.


"Whatever your origins, your cultural and religious choices, what you look like and the people you spend evenings with in front of the TV, you are always welcome at Ikea.  We don't even care how your kitchen is organized. We care about you, simply because of who you are."

ChatGPT: AI VS LEGAL PROTECTION.

Some had already hired him as their personal ghost writer, others considered him a creative demon. Recently released in its fourth edition, the language model developed by OpenAI, which uses deep learning techniques to generate text that is as close to human as possible,  was blocked in Italy until April 30.


And until that date anyone trying to connect found this message: "Dear ChatGpt customer, we are sorry to inform you that we have disabled the service for users in Italy at the request of the Italian Garante."


"If the machine can fool humans into thinking it is human in turn, then it can be called intelligent, that is, capable of reproducing human cognitive functions," Alan Turing's criterion published in 1950 in the journal Mind had established.


ChatGPT stopped short of the Italian law protecting privacy rights. The question on everyone's mind was, "Will it be smart enough to overcome even the legal barriers?"


Sam Altman, ceo of OpenAI wrote in a tweet, "Italy is one of my favorite countries and I can't wait to go back there soon!" But how? We know that when the intellectual challenge between man and machine shifts to an ethical plane, everything comes back into question, intelligence tests included.


Because when it comes to an issue as sensitive as people's privacy, 100 trillion parameters are not enough to solve the problem.

The Q: THE SQUARED WHEELS.

"Can you pedal easily on a bicycle with square wheels?" That had been the question in the second math test of the 2017 Science Baccalaureate.


Squaring the circle is the ultimate goal of anyone setting out to tackle a task, in any field. If, until today in order to ride a bike with square wheels you had to go to the MoMath-Museum of Mathematics in New York in the pavilion dedicated to mathematical fun, today you can find a prototype on YouTube as well.


It is the project of Sergii Gordieiev, the Ukrainian engineer who managed to build a working and "rideable" bike with non-circular wheels.


What actually moves is not the wheels but the tires: the wheels, made from recycled pieces to obtain square circles, are stationary and the mechanism is similar to that of a tracked vehicle.


This means it has more friction than traditional bikes, but also more stability. Of course, the engineer had to reconfigure every single aspect of the wheel to fit, from the size of the frame to the drive system.


Will we soon run into cyclists pedaling down the street on bikes with square wheels? For now, the traffic generated by the square wheel remains a problem confined to YouTubers.

Adam, the last born of 2050

Plasmon and Chicco tell who we will be in 2050. This is not fantasy but statistics: if the birth rate continues to decline so exponentially, Adam could be the last child to be born in 2050.


More than a communication campaign, this is a project that feels the need to do something concrete about the birth rate issue in Italy.


After collecting the main needs and struggles of current and future families, Plasmon identified some aspects to bring to the attention of companies and institutions, with a particular focus on organizational and economic aspects, labor aspects and educational aspects.


With an integrated project that includes a commercial, a website and a collection of testimonies Plasmon and Chicco are making a real promise: to bring these issues to the States General of Natality in order to find concrete solutions that encourage families to have children.


Alessandro Rosina, professor of Demography and Social Statistics at the Faculty of Economics comments: "We need to be able to move from the idea of a child as an economic cost and an organizational complication for parents to the concept of a child as a collective value in which the whole society has convenience to invest." In this case, the first investors are precisely the brands that have children as their core business.

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