Collective cool

'Cool', Brands and 'Cool' Brands

The term ‘cool’ is widely used expression in popular culture. This word is prefixed liberally with anything including people, behavior, place and brands. Notwithstanding ambiguity about what it stands there is complete clarity that it certainly adds value. ‘Cool’ in this perspective is precious resource which can be used in brand building. The authors’ exploration into its genesis and meaning r...

What’s Cool? - Collective Fashion-like Behavior Emerges from Neuro-psychological Conditioning

We present an agent-based model of the emergence of fashion-like collective behavior, based on a simple abstraction of individuals neuro-psychological conditioning. Our results show that fashion-like collective behavior can emerge from social interaction and the working of individuals’ neuro-psychological mechanisms, within a wide range of plausible assumptions about the levels of social strati...

To cool or not to cool?

Too Cool at School - Understanding Cool Teenagers

Cool can be thought about on three levels; the having of cool things, the doing of cool stuff and the being of cool. Whilst there is some understanding of cool products, the concept, of being cool is much more elusive to designers and developers of systems. This study examines this space by using a set of pre-prepared teenage personas as probes with a set of teenagers with the aim of better und...

Cool Dentists

Our planet has reached extreme weather conditions. Recently , a tornado in the US killed 519 people. Floods in Asia and Australia killed 2,000 and left large swaths of each country under water. Korea had its heaviest snowfall in recorded history. My heart goes out to all the families of the victims of the recent serious disasters. These events have been shaped by global warming. Scientists have...