Insights 9.25

Design:

• A good article (despite the clickbait-y title) on the trials and tribulations of printing metals on a large scale. While printing large structures is impractical for many reasons, there are specialized cases where the weight-savings can add up to enough cost savings to make the whole strange endeavor worthwhile. Just as the availability of structural steel changed the look and shape of cities forever, avant-garde practices like 3D printing will make their (likely much smaller) mark on our aesthetic surroundings. 
• Automatic design solutions have been a perennial tech news story for many years now, and there's still little reason to believe they will fundamentally replace human designers any time soon. What this article notes correctly is that long before automation takes an industry or a profession, it speeds along the basics, replacing simpler human craft with decent work done by machines. This has two big impacts: reducing entry level positions, and reducing the nuanced lessons that come from doing a thing (even a small, simple task) in a hands-on, highly repeated way. 

Body/Image: 

• Amazon has apparently been developing their own take on "smart" glasses. So far the e-commerce and web services giant has enjoyed big successes with their Alexa-laden products, but for the most part their history of hardware has been littered with little-loved commodity style products, designed to reduce the distance between you and an Amazon order. Smart glasses and wearable tech in general has been an incredibly tricky puzzle (for technological and cultural reasons) that few companies have managed to even begin to solve. We're not optimistic that Amazon will be able to deliver something that provides enough value with minimal creep factor to be a big success, but they have almost as much bet-making money as any company could want. 

Big Business: 

• Swiss power & robotics company ABB has bought up one of General Electric's business units, hoping to be more competitive with their French rival, Schneider Electric. 
• A new program out of MIT is hoping to connect investors with companies that are working on technologies that have long and difficult routes of development, with R&D times far beyond what investors typically have the tolerance for. 

Our Weird Future: 

• Stray dogs in Thailand are being outfitted with camera vests that turn them into a roving surveillance system. The ways in which we instrument city spaces says a lot about our cultural values, fears, and philosophies of what it means to share space with strangers. What co-opting stray dogs as state snitches says about us... well, we're going to need to think on that for a bit. 

More next week. 

Insights 9.18

Design:

• A good post about how deep Apple's design efforts really go. Beyond the high quality manufacturing prowess making those shiny surfaces is a tightly knit strategy that extends to every corner of the product, near and long term. Design is never one thing, it's never just the skin of a object, it's never the ease of an app's UX. At it's most complex and most invested, design really means something more like focus - an unrelenting guiding force toward certain principles; the things that you can't or won't trade off.

Feeding the Future: 

• As the climate changes, so does the atmosphere. Scientists have been examining the implications of higher concentrations of CO₂ - and the news isn't looking good. While plants grow faster and larger with the presence of more CO₂, they also develop an inferior nutrition profile: less protein, lower amounts of vitamins and minerals, and more sugars. As a result, even with our best efforts to balance our meals and include plenty of fruits and vegetables, we may still be consuming a less nutrient rich diet than our recent ancestors. As with so many climate-related issues, this one will hit nations in the global south harder than their affluent counterparts, where diets are more concentrated on a smaller selection of staple foods that are growing dangerously withered in their micronutrient profiles over time. 
• Researchers have developed a technology package that enables machines to autonomously plant, tend, and ultimately harvest a barley crop, without human intervention. It's an incredible feat with wide-ranging implications. The cost of such a system is high, but it could provide impoverished agrarian communities with immensely valuable labor savings and food security, likely at a lower cost (with more durable benefits and independence) than annual foreign aid. If such systems could be developed for an expansive range of crops, we could be looking at an entirely different paradigm of food and labor as we move through the 21st century. 

Up in the Air: 

• Frustrated with both the cost and large pack-out size of available surveillance drone systems, the U.S. Marine Corps underwent an effort to crowdsource a low-cost but highly capable design. In the end a modified version of a design from Thingiverse combined with some open-source software netted a less capable but dramatically cheaper version. 
• A new Techstars program is starting up in Boston, that's focused on autonomous technologies and has been developed at least in part by the U.S. Air Force. Tech startups and defense department spending have gone hand in hand for a long time, between DARPA funding robotics research and the CIA's venture arm In-Q-Tel funding 3D printing startups to the Open Technology Fund spending money on the encrypted chat app Signal. 
• African countries like Tanzania and Rwanda are deploying drones for real, critical tasks at a pace far outstripping many wealthier nations. 

Engineering Communities: 

• A new startup is offering to foot the bill for the downpayment on your house, provided you keep listing one or more bedrooms on Airbnb for a few years and hand them most of the revenue. With the tightening up of credit lines for regular folks following the 2008 housing crisis, there are fewer options, which has sparked a bizarro world of housing possibilities. It's unclear what a rise in such systems would mean for places: what is the net effect of a pseudo-hotelier-landlord class on the cultural fabric of a neighborhood? No word on what would happen in the (honestly unlikely) event that Airbnb goes under.
• In the wake of Hurricane Irma, a bit of greedy, shortsighted policy from power companies has left more people in the dark, for longer. The Miami New Times reports that lobbying by power companies led to a policy that all solar energy systems had to be tied into the grid. If the power goes out, your solar panels are mandated to go down with it. If we want to get to a better future, communities need to be free to build their own systems without being levered by their government on behalf of corporate interests. In the case of a future that may well be riddled with climate-change fueled disasters, a more distributed, DIY form of engineered community could be among the best solutions for preserving life and livelihood. 

More next week. 

Insights 9.12

Design:

• Annie Ivanova argues that Taiwan has emerged as a top design hub, after many decades of operating as contract manufacturer to the world. 
• Accenture has acquired yet another design firm: this time it's the industrial design firm MATTER. This is less than a year after acquiring the Boston-based design shop Altitude. Long time readers of this newsletter will know we're a bit skeptical of mega-business consultancies scooping up design team after design team in a way that proves valuable and sustainable for both parties. 

Energy: 

• Batteries have long been a fixture of technological utopian dreams, but even as we boost their performance and capacity with material science breakthroughs, our collective hunger for ever more energy keeps us tied to the rooted infrastructure of the electric grid. Historian Nathan Kapoor looks at batteries past and how we might reconsider the broader systems that surround the technology to truly unlock their transformative potential. 
• Today's biggest battery booster is undeniably Elon Musk, and his company Tesla made headlines last week for increasing (via over-the-air update) the effective range of cars that were fleeing regions of the U.S. soon to be wrecked by hurricanes and flooding. While it was more of an unlocking of an available upgrade than a physics magic trick, it's an interesting case to look at in terms adapting technology to suit the circumstances in real time. 

On Screen: 

• It's an all too common story in the development and deploying of technology: people of color are left out of the research stage, and the resulting products fail them in one way or another. It's happened with color film, it's happened with wearable devices, it's happened with facial recognition software. So when an artist or inventor is aware of those traps and develops techniques to overcome them, the results can be stunning in their richness. In this case it's cinematographer Ava Berkofsky, talking to Mic about how the right lighting practices and optical treatments give black actors the full on-screen dimensionality that white actors have enjoyed for many decades. 
• Movie studios that have had a lackluster summer are at least partly blaming poor sales on the effect of review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. While it's obviously an overreach to say such a site undeservedly dooms perfectly fine films, there is something to be said about the ripple effect of other people's opinions. Why we like what we do emerges from a mélange of factors, only some of which is reflective of our "authentic" desires. Almost certainly, the quick access we have to masses of other opinions is fundamentally changing how we encounter, enjoy, and dismiss everything from works of art to brunch spots. 

Material Culture: 

• (PDF) A fascinating investigation into the weird world of fake storefronts, Alibaba, and "free" watches. It's a sort of material vortex created from some entrepreneurial lark, with goods produced in the most aggressively cheap way possible, and marketed with every SEO and branding trick in the book, all resulting in a glut of barely functional watches that need to be offloaded one way or another. The watch is a model of our global ouroboros of consumption and creation, where it can be difficult to tell where demand ends and fraudulent hype begins.

More next week.