Need to Know

Mount Wuyi – The Yue Wuyi Tea Life Aesthetics Hotel is using the area’s history of tea culture to inspire a hospitality experience.

The hotel is located in the subtropical region of Mount Wuyi, an area known for producing Chinese tea. With the population of the area dwindling, the Beijing-based Wuxiang Space Architecture Design Studio designed the hotel with the aim of attracting tourists to the historic area while raising awareness of the tea it produces.

When designing the interior of the hotel, the studio merged Chinese tea culture with Buddhism in order to encourage ‘poetic charm, tea drinking and Dao talking’. The hotel also taps into the demand for quiet retreats, offering a serene environment in which to fully experience tea culture.

We recently explored the rise in Bed and Beverages – hotels where drinking is not confined to the bar. As more consumers engage in tea drinking, as this hotel demonstrates, there is an opportunity for tea brands to move into the hospitality sector.

London – Artist Olafur Eliasson has unveiled a temporary public artwork using blocks of melting glacial ice to create a tangible representation of climate change.

Working with fellow artist Minik Rosing, Eliasson has taken 30 free-floating icebergs from the waters surrounding Greenland and installed them outside the Tate Modern gallery and Bloomberg's headquarters in London, where they have been left to melt. Previous iterations of the installation, called Ice Watch, appeared in Copenhagen in 2014 and Paris in 2015.

The project, which coincides with the COP24 climate conference in Poland, aims to ‘transform climate knowledge into climate action’. ‘This sculpture will capture the imagination and help Londoners of all ages to understand first-hand the environmental challenges we all face,’ says Justine Simons, London’s deputy mayor for culture and the creative industries.

As brands adopt an increasingly civic role in the lives of consumers – acting as both educators and enablers – there is an opportunity for them to engage citizens with environmental issues and events, such as Earth Day.

New survey data from Pew Research Center shows that news sources in America are evolving, with social media outpacing print newspapers for the first time.

While television remains the most popular platform for news consumption, one in five adults are now looking to social media for news updates. Among adults aged 18-29 this figure rises to 36%, making social media the most popular news platform for young Americans.

Research also finds this age group does not rely on any one platform in the way that the majority of their elders do – only half of Americans aged 18-49 often get news from just one platform.

As the news landscape continues to evolve, alternative platforms such as Nuzzera and Tortoise are responding to consumers seeking peer-sourced media they can trust.