2016 The Year the Camera Changed Everything
The smartphone changed the standard from it looks okay from the road to the forensic zoom from the pavement.
2016 — The most important thing that happened to property maintenance in 2016 had nothing to do with the weather. The smartphone zoom lens changed what homeowners could see from their own pavement, and what they could see was twenty years of accumulated biological growth, limescale, and surface degradation that had been invisible at eye level. If you first noticed the condition of your exterior in 2016 and have not yet addressed it, the biology that the camera revealed has had a further decade to establish itself in the substrate beneath the surface you were looking at.
The Zoom Lens Changes the Standard
Smartphones, Zoom Lenses, and the New Standard of Visible Cleanliness
Storms 2016 — 6 named storms — Gertrude (29-30 Jan — 105mph Shetland); Henry (1-2 Feb); Imogen (7-8 Feb); Angus (19-20 Nov — 84mph South England); Barbara (20-21 Dec); Conor (23-27 Dec)
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ONS Consumer Spending
ONS: UK smartphone ownership reached 71% by 2016. The proportion of homeowners using photo and video to document property condition for insurance and resale purposes grew significantly. The forensic eye had arrived in the domestic market.
2016 marks a watershed in the relationship between homeowners and their properties: the smartphone camera made exterior condition universally visible at a resolution that the naked eye could not achieve. A homeowner who previously walked past their property and saw it as clean could now zoom in from the pavement and see the biological colonisation on the render, the limescale on the glass, the green tint on the driveway. This change in perception drove demand for exterior cleaning services in a way that no amount of marketing had previously achieved. The standard shifted from it looks okay from the road to I can see it in a photo I took on my phone. For a mobile exterior cleaning business, 2016 was the year word of mouth was superseded by documentary evidence. Customers began sharing before-and-after photographs as a matter of course. The review culture that would eventually weaponise our industry was the same review culture that initially built it.
Unseasonable — as usual. 2016 was a year of atmospheric and political turbulence in equal measure. The weather moan competed with other moans for the first time. Brexit provided an alternative conversational catastrophe that briefly displaced the British weather as the national default complaint. By October, however, the rain had returned and the weather reasserted its ancient dominance. Some things are more reliable than politics. The sky, it turns out, is one of them.
The smartphone zoom lens revealed biological growth that had been present but invisible to the naked eye, generating demand that finally matched the accumulated treatment deficit; biological bloom velocity steady (BBV 5/10); infrastructure stress moderate; approximately 440 stewardship hours available — a transitional year where visibility of the problem finally met willingness to address it.
BIO-BLOOM VELOCITY
BBV 5/10 — Steady. The smartphone reveals existing biology. Treatment demand begins to match accumulated load.
INFRASTRUCTURE STRESS COEFFICIENT
Primary Stress: Accumulated Deficit Visibility — 60%. No new primary stress but smartphone documentation reveals the compounded damage from 2001-2015 simultaneously.
STEWARDSHIP WINDOW
440 hours. A broadly workable year. The new demand generated by smartphone visibility met a year that could actually accommodate it.
MOAN-O-METER
6/10. The weather moan competed with Brexit for the first time. The sky remained grey throughout but the political weather was considered more pressing by most.