Irony

1. Irony
In the past.. that is, in my early thirties,
I once planned a related product and business model with the intention of starting an IoT product business.
In that process, I once benchmarked modular furniture.
The biggest advantage of modular furniture is that wherever you move it, you can change its structure and form to fit the space.
One thing to keep in mind, though, is that furniture in homes, shops, or offices does not exist solely for the useful or efficient function of its role within the space.
This is purely about user experience.
Just like the unstructured 'eye for it' in fashion that certain influencers or those around us favor, or the 'how-it-feels-to-step-out-of-it' in cars, the recognition of others plays a very important role.

The main features modular furniture has are, in fact, very well suited to people who have to move every year or every two years on monthly rentals or jeonse leases.., or to put it more elegantly, those with a nomadic lifestyle.
But (the irony I felt was) that such products are priced beyond the reach of those very consumers. In fact, in many cases buying ready-made furniture each time you move turns out to be cheaper.

Yet such irony doesn't seem to exist only with modular furniture.


2. Various social ironies that show structural similarity
It's already been decades since smartphones became mainstream. The world, and people's patterns, have truly been overturned.
And yet when you walk down the street, you sometimes see people - holding a smartphone, even the latest folding-style Galaxy - asking passersby for the location of a particular place.

In the IT industry (you may not believe this or empathize), if you go outside Gyeonggi-do - to the provinces - there are many startups that don't know about Figma or Notion (Jira or Slack are unimaginable). In the provinces, apart from contracted-services businesses, there are practically no IT companies that target a particular market.

Even IT companies have most of their people commuting two or three hours every day to come into the office (even though there isn't even an hour a day of face-to-face communication for work). Even though the role itself isn't a service-industry job, rather than developing for operational and managerial efficiency, the situation has become abnormally over-specialized in implementing development that yields direct revenue and in survival instincts toward internal (manager or investor) customers.

It's similar, it seems, to the reality that even now only 67% of the world's population (as of 2023, ITU) can use the internet.

What's right in front of us now (and the gap here is also large),
OTA cars (auto-update, not EV) and AI, also seem to be similar.