Seamless. Sorman-Nilsson Anders

perfect, unblemished. Its antonyms include: amiss, bad, censurable, defective, faulty, flawed, imperfect and reproachable.

      Let's expand on this idea of seamlessness, and why I believe it to be the elixir of our business and personal futures.

      The mythical origins of seamlessness

      While we will ultimately investigate seamlessness for its modern application, the profundity of the term takes us back in history, and is relevant to its future application as the ‘Holy Grail' of design. The idea of seamlessness in textiles, in fact, does hold religious and spiritual connotations. The ‘Seamless Robe of Jesus' (or Holy Robe) is the garment said to have been worn by Jesus during or shortly before his crucifixion. According to the Gospel of John, the soldiers who crucified Jesus cast lots when deciding who would keep the garment, rather than dividing it, precisely because it was woven in one piece, without seams, providing a mythical association to the technique of circular knitting that may have made Jesus' garment and imbues it with a supernatural quality. (See John 19:23–24 for the full details.) According to Wikipedia, and depending on which brand of Christianity you choose to listen to, the robe can today be found preserved in Trier (Germany), Argenteuil (France), or Sankt Petersburg and Moscow (Russia). The idea of the ‘seamless garment' has since been mythically and morally adopted by Christians in the ‘seamless garment philosophy', which holds that issues such as abortion, capital punishment, militarism, euthanasia, social injustice and economic injustice all require a consistent line of moral reasoning which value the sacredness of human life. The Roman Catholic pacifist Eileen Eagan, for example, said that ‘the protection of life is a seamless garment. You can't protect some life and not others.' Seamlessness in other words, runs deep.

      Its literal, textile roots come from the technique of circular knitting. This is a form of knitting that creates a seamless tube and so ensures less friction on the body (which the seams may otherwise have caused on our delicate skin – I, for one, moisturise often). Seamless items are imbued with a sense of high quality, and deep empathy with their wearers. While this can certainly be done by hand-knitting, the process of circular, seamless production can also be done by machine. Let me illustrate this with an example from a business trip to Tokyo, Japan, in 2014.

      I was in Tokyo to work with our long-time client, Fuji Xerox, at their flagship event for their Premier Partners in Asia Pacific. Beyond the opportunity of working with the Fuji Xerox Chairman, Tadahito Yamamoto, I was also looking forward to exploring Tokyo by foot, and in particular I had my sartorial eye set on the Loopwheeler store in Sendagaya. The irony of this attraction is that as a futurist, I am well versed in the idea that change, adaptation and agility are key to brands' survival in a fast-evolving landscape. However, it's exactly the extreme reluctance of Loopwheeler to adapt and modernise (along with Merz b. Schwanen in the Swabian Alps of Germany, it is one of the only two remaining factories producing authentic loopwheel terry cloth) which makes the brand so sustainable.

      Originally, I had come across this brand in Monocle magazine's 52nd edition. While reading the 2012 article ‘Reinvent the Wheel – Wakayama' by Kenji Hall, I fell in love with the collaboration between man and machine that results in the supercomfy Loopwheeler sweatshirts. Loopwheeling equipment is always based on a tubular knit (or tube body) construction, which means that the resulting garment (usually a t-shirt or a sweatshirt) is made of a single piece of seamless fabric. In other words, the fabric is knitted around a tube and comes out without side seams, as one tubular shape. Loopwheeler takes this approach a step further – trust the Japanese to positively geek out about the process – and takes their customer empathy to the next level.

      The vintage machines used by Loopwheeler are from a bygone era of industrialisation. But this doesn't render them irrelevant. On the contrary. While Hall points out in his article that ‘the machines are a throwback to an analogue era, almost driven to extinction by technological progress', the evident inefficiency of the 1920s machinery (they produce just one metre of cloth an hour, or enough for eight sweatshirts a day) is counterbalanced by founder Satoshi Suzuki's ‘focus on craftsmanship and quality', which has ‘won Loopwheeler a small, cult-like following that spans the globe' – evidenced by my pilgrimage to Suzuki's Sendagaya shopfront.

      Suzuki became interested in manufacturing techniques, and how they impact on durability and softness in garments, while at university. During his visits to factories, he learned that loopwheeling machines don't stretch the textile threads taut like modern manufacturing equipment, which means that the resulting fabric can better withstand wear and tear. The machines (which according to Hall resemble large caterpillars) spin twenty-four times a minute – slower than vinyl on a record player – and, rather than the fabric being pulled down by a machine, gravity is the only force that pulls the circular tube of fabric gently down the loopwheeling machine. And as the proud owner of two Loopwheeler garments – a cardigan and a t-shirt, bought on two separate business visits to Tokyo in 2014 and 2015 – I can attest to their comfort, quality and fit. As a tangent, given the tales of cotton dust in their factory, I must also linguistically alert you that the metaphor of ‘cottoning on to an idea' has textile roots and, according to some linguists, describes the attachment of cotton to machinery, while others say it describes the comfortable attachment to its wearer. Either way, the comfortable intimacy between customer and garment is something that has become part and parcel of the cultural weave at Loopwheeler. And the quest for this seamless intimacy is what this book is all about.

      The idea that I described in my last book, Digilogue: How to win the digital minds and analogue hearts of tomorrow's customer – of the coming together of the different worlds of the analogue and the digital – evolves in the transformational context of Seamless. Today, and into the foreseeable future, heroes, hero brands, and mentors must nudge, guide and move themselves and their clients between an ordinary world – often the analogue – and an extraordinary, magical world, the digital. Whether we can design transitions that are seamless, effortless and frictionless is a decisive factor for the future of technology and the success of business leaders. And as the British science fiction author Arthur C Clarke pointed out in his third law: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. That seamless fusion – that Holy Grail of magical indistinguishability – is what this book is about.

      Australian brand Telstra seem to have cottoned on to this idea of seamlessness. In their 2016 magical brand ad, they refer to Clarke's aforesaid technology law, in positioning how technology can bring people together in a magical, extraordinary world, across the tyranny of distance and the ordinary world, via virtual reality headsets, drones and videoconferencing bedtime stories. Challenged to wander in the magic of wonder, the viewer is asked to suspend belief for a moment, and enter the magical world of Telstra-enabled connectivity, where the walls between science fiction and fact have broken down. Whether Telstra is that enabler remains to be seen, but suffice to say that we are now standing on the precipice of technological magic, and we are being challenged by history and philosophy as to whether we are prepared to take a leap of faith.

      We stand at the gates of another technology revolution, shaped by artificial intelligence, machine-to-machine communications, the Internet of Things, predictive customer service, learning machines, and the fusion of biology with technology, automation and roboticisation. These advanced technologies will either wreak havoc on the world as we used to know it, or enable us to transform and evolve at much greater speeds than ever known to humans. The lines between science fiction and reality are blurring thanks to augmented and virtual realities. These technologies, in their inherent magical advancement, can enable and empower heroes in a futuristic fashion on their journeys into tomorrow. And when the art of empathetic human design converges seamlessly with the science of technology, we may be able to guide, inspire and lead our partners, clients and loved ones between ordinary, analogue worlds, and special, extraordinary, digital worlds. This seamless interplay between the two worlds is the magical elixir for great brands and leaders of tomorrow. And this is the quest that lies behind this book.

      Embracing the frictive hero's journey

      After setting out on what has become a three-year quest to explore the idea of seamlessness, and in my sense-making efforts and reflections on the trials and tribulations of guiding digital adaptation and human transformation in an age of digital disruption, I began to see certain patterns. Phases