Turning Residential Space Into a Platform
Current situation
* We do an incalculable amount of consumption inside the enormous platform that is residential space.
* Under the current commercial landlord model — the old-style money management — owners take out loans to buy or build a building, pay back that cost with deposits, live off the monthly rent, and when a tenant leaves, they keep spending on renovations, wallpaper, flooring, and so on.
Prices keep rising, but with average social wages not rising in step, studio rooms keep shrinking, and over time the price of those tiny rooms still goes up. People then cut spending and move residences. That vicious cycle just keeps repeating.
Expectations
* The market for a residential-space platform is incomparably larger than the smartphone's diverse ecosystems and consumer spending.
* In the lifestyle structure of people everywhere, including Korea, housing has an enormous influence:
1/3 of income goes to it, 2/5 of a person's life is consumed by it.
* Just by solving the housing problem, humanity can grow enormously in consumption level, R&D investment, education, leisure levels, productivity, and motivation.
Outline
* A local-based ecosystem -> Synapse platform
* Similar in pattern to Gmarket, credit cards, mobile phones
* Purchase and payment run through the local community (ecosystem setup)
* Self-sufficiency -> national division of labor -> global division of labor -> (national-local) self-sufficiency -> (global-local) self-sufficiency
Social atmosphere: feasibility, preconditions
* Zero growth: once housing is taken as the premise, fundamental change follows.
* Just as the daily life and possibilities of people in an era without guaranteed safety (personal safety, public order, gun ownership, crime, common knowledge about violence/murder, common knowledge about natural events like earthquakes and tsunamis) are on an entirely different plane from those of people today,
this shifts the dimension of the attitudes and concepts that divide primitive, medieval, and modern daily life.
* Changing the concept of space: normalstory
A cafe is not just a place to consume coffee. A department store is not just a place to consume products. This means price or branding alone have limits when it comes to providing value, and the contradiction can become visible.
The age of mass production -> marketing -> packaging -> branding -> customization -> SPA -> story, justification (explanation) -> shifting toward a convincing space, toward timing (feeling, sensory perception).
* Development of a trust-based way of living
* Shifts in consumption behavior -> collective buying leads to more ownership, to premium goods, customization, and higher price points.
* Changing the common sense and behavioral baseline of relationships: leveling up
* (National-local) self-sufficiency : sharing, the sharing economy, rational consumption, value creation,
sustainable production, producing goods only after thinking seriously about the environment
Operations
* Housing is free; only maintenance costs at 1/(n+a), where a varies by environment, sustainability, and management
* B2B deals
- Policy: local governments
- Composition: IKEA, Muji/Uniqlo — direct import, Samsung, LG
- Service-system build: card companies, Jennifer Soft, online payment module vendors
* A Paul-the-Apostle-style switcher
(the spontaneously thriving mobile-phone dealers) (key men) (coaching)
After implementation
* Normalization of the market for mass-circulated philosophy and art
* Opening up education
* Evidence-based bottom-up policy adoption
* Hongik-ingan ("Benefit broadly for humankind")
