Information - Man(agement) :: Data Mining :: Psychology :: Future

On Tuesday I attended a conference “Trendtag” which is hosted by “Trendbüro” a leading german trend (and future) research company. This years theme was “Karma-Capitalism _ Values instead of Prices”.

One of the speakers was Josephine Green - Head of the Trends and Strategy division at Philips Design. She spoke about the great impact that web 2.0 had on the industry. Since everybody can easily find information about products on the web and discuss them in an adequate community or network, the former consumer becomes a user of a product who gets involved into the production cycle and than becomes a co-producer.

Somewhere in the speech Ms. Green asked the audience to please come up with a better term for this new kind of “user co-producer” wich would not be burdened with the negative connotation which comes with the word consumer. In 1980 published book The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler coined the term prosumer, but as you see it contains the unbeloved term consumer and can nowadays also be interpreted as professional consumer.
So I took the challange and after 5 minutes of thinking and writing I had the very simple but appealing idea of calling them us produser wich is apperantly a combination of producer and user and can not be confused with a professional user because of the “d” in between

In the 6th minute I got a little depressed because I recalled that we live in the age of google and sure there would be somebody who had the same idea before me. But anyway I thought the idea was good enough to go and speak about it with Ms. Green.
She liked it and maybe she’ll use it now in her speeches rather then such monstrous combinations like “user and co-producer”.

Here I’ve got to give credit to somebody who seems to be the first person who used the term produser on the net, Dr. Axel Bruns. Hm.. nice site. I’ll stay a little longer and explore ..

Posted in trend, recommendation, neologism |