Insights 11.20

 Design:

• A brief, well annotated article on how people anthropomorphize objects, and the impacts of extending the relationship between artifact and person beyond the utilitarian.
• On the airbrushed t-shirt as wearable memorial. 

 Building Things:

• An short interview with Natan Linder of Tulip Interfaces, talking about how technology can augment the factory assembly line worker. There are some good quotes and points within the conversation that underscore the creativity of the human mind and its continued value even in a highly automated era. To a large degree, the public (and media) perception of factory workers is of a workforce composed of undereducated drones, completing rote task after rote task. While this may be the case in some plants, the best manufacturers understand the value of front line workers to solve complex problems, regardless of what their formal education is. In many factories around the world, line workers regularly invent new product features and contribute intellectual property. The notion of shifting as much of the cognitive load of rote work to computerized systems to increase capacity for human ingenuity is a good one, if not part of the standard narrative. 

Virtually There: 

• Furniture & home goods maker Williams-Sonoma (which contains the brands Pottery Barn, West Elm, Mark & Graham, and others) has purchased an augmented reality startup for $112 MM. This, along with IKEA's acquisition of TaskRabbit, demonstrate that old-school retailers are taking the threat posed by e-commerce first companies like Amazon and Wayfair seriously, devising ways to propel more purchases through digital enablement, whether it's advanced visualization or on-demand assembly labor. 
• Despite the multitude of virtual reality projects aimed at expanding empathy, there's little to no evidence that those experiences have any sticking power. W. Sebastian Kamau examines the practice of putting racial realities into virtual ones, and outlines the ways in which those projects are deeply flawed. 

Just A Game: 

• A profile of people making a living from Twitch, the livestreaming service primarily used for watching other people play videogames. While it’s a uniquely 21st century way to earn a living, it shares a Horatio Alger lineage with the past: the notion that through enough grueling hours, one can crack through the dark tunnel of labor and bask in the fresh air and warm light of grand success. And like those better-life-through miserable toil stories of the last century, this one too requires immensely unhealthy practices. One of the now successful Twitch-celebrities states that in the beginning he needed to stream eighteen hours or more every day to grow his fledgling following, a routine so sedentary that it swelled his ankles and brought his weight to over four hundred pounds. It seems odd that watching someone else play a game for hours on end would hold appeal for so many. Some speculate that the value is similar to seeing an athlete or musician perform at their peak abilities: a vicarious delight in experiencing another human do something, anything, exceptionally well. The subtext here is that the precarity of work in the 21st century requires endless novelty and reinvention, and such reinvention reduces the likelihood of anyone ever truly gaining mastery over a subject, skill, or tool. There's a sense that to watch someone excel, even in an unreal world, is as close as we may get to deep practice ourselves. 
   

Machines for Moving: 

• Autonomous cars may become another object-symbol turned political war zone, with boosters fantasizing about less stressful commutes, greater leisure time, and limited car accidents, while skeptics express concern that autonomous vehicles will become mandated, erasing a particularly form of independence granted by a fast car careening down an open road. 

Behavior: 

• Studying how gendered expectations of discourse shape workplace communications within the messaging app Slack. At the heart of the issue is how rigid ideas behavior are put onto people from our earliest days, socializing individuals for very different norms and mores depending on gender. Our apps may not be helping to disrupt those imposed boxes, but the root of the problem comes earlier, and across many domains. 

More next week. 

Insights 11.13

 Design:

• WeWork, the venture capital fueled coworking space company, has been seeking expansion into other aspects of life over the past few years, ranging from dorm-like corporate apartments to gyms. Now they're turning their attention to childhood education, and the first design concepts from Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) have been released. The style is aggressively bland: a beige-soaked bastardization of a Montessori school that's more oriented towards adult tastes than creating a rich learning environment for young minds. This is that most pompous type of design, imposing a rigid notion of 'good taste' that is almost puritanical in its self-imposed discipline of nothingness. While it's totally in line with the affluent lifestyle brand WeWork seems to strive for, it is at odds with the beautifully messy chaos of being a kid and experiencing the world for the first time. 
• Considering the past and present of 'modest' clothing for women, sometimes a representation of personal freedom, sometimes an artifact of intense social pressures.

Body/Image: 

• Warby Parker is using the latest iPhone facial imaging tech to show you what their glasses would look like on your face. Not the most exciting application, but a real indicator of a non-gaming augmented reality application entering the mainstream.
• The gross practice of brands using stories about accessibility tech as a PR tool, without committing real resources to developing the projects into real products that would improve the lives of people with disabilities. 

Bias and Brains: 

• Naomi Wu, a designer/hacker/engineer (or maker, if you prefer that verbiage) has been harassed with odd claims that she is a fabricated persona, backed by an amalgam of skilled (male) engineers. There's zero evidence of this bizarre theory, but that didn't stop Maker CEO Dale Dougherty from taking the wild conspiracy theory for fact, and making public statements to that effect. It's emblematic of how sexist ideas of who is and is not a legitimate engineer, coder, or 'maker' persist within some very influential and powerful organizations. If Dougherty was better versed in the history of technological and scientific innovations, he would know that the more typical truth is that pioneering work of female inventors is obscured or co-opted by their male counterparts. 

More next week. 

Insights 11.07

 Design:

• An excellent story on shop design, safety, and gender at Olin College. As with most things design related, focusing on making something more accessible and transforming opaque in-group knowledge into transparent information for outsiders ends up improving the experience for all. 
• Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, has existed since the 6th century and like any long-running practice that remains relevant, it has undergone many aesthetic and philosophical shifts. An activity that is as deliberate in effort and fleeting in outcome seems even more remarkable in 2017. But then again, maybe the careful arranging of our feeds and the continual fading of content shares something of the quiet visual poetry of Ikebana, at least if we could rid ourselves of the ads and turn scroll speeds to a more humanely glacial pace. It seems the gift of focus and reflection that this art form provides has always been a welcome presence among the existential noise of being a human in the world, whether it's 627 or 2017.
• The infamously obscure UI of Snapchat may be getting a significant reworking in order to make it more accessible to a broader, less tech savvy demographic, a move most likely spurred on by pressure to respond to shareholders upset by the company falling behind industry stalwarts. 

Labor Pains: 

• It seems that the factory workers behind Zara's fast fashion clothes are being mistreated and working without pay. The Turkish workers managed to get their message through via the garments themselves, attaching labels to garments that told would-be purchasers that they had received no pay for their work. It's a rare, direct reminder of the toil and abuse behind crafting the goods we readily consume without thought to their origins.
• In the digital workplace, supervision can look a lot like surveillance. Technology companies are scrambling to create tools that scan virtual actions of employees, trawling for foul language, potential harassment cases, and behavioral changes that could signal someone is about to leave the company. 

Virtually There:  

• The iPhone X is almost certainly going to be the first big consumer AR device, which could bring face-mapping from Snapchat sideshow to global in a way that only Apple's scale can manage.   
• More and more, the food we eat is prepared by others, and we may never even visit the restaurant. It turns out, there may be no restaurant to visit, as many meals that are ordered via app are made outside of the confines of traditional restaurants. In lieu of juggling the complex choreography involved in running a restaurant (which is as much about the theater of ambiance, service, and a healthy hum of activity as it is about food quality) many culinary entrepreneurs are creating much smaller, production-focused facilities, accessible only through the small, shiny portal of a smartphone screen. 

Automatons: 

• Alexis Madrigal on how children attempt to understand robotic toys, and how toymakers' attempts to 'boost customer engagement' may step over the line of enjoyment to manipulation. 

Branded: 

• Amazon is following up their fashion tech investments over the last few years with the introduction of numerous brands-within-a-brand for apparel and furniture. They seem to be borrowing the shopworn ampersand-laden naming conventions of many a dead-end e-commerce startup: one of their furniture lines is "Stone & Beam," a reflection of both their astute powers of consumer-behavior data crunching and the overwhelming blandness of their house brands. The everything-store giant already sells more house brand batteries than Duracell, along with copious amounts of everything from baby wipes to HDMI cables, all bolstered by insider analytics and the ability to preference their own lines in search results. While customers are mostly on the winning side of this, paying lower prices for what are ultimately artificially differentiated commodities, many of their competitors must be stewing about the seismic changes in the market. We would not be at all surprised to see a coalition of multinational corporations teaming up to lobby U.S. politicians in the coming years, bringing an antitrust effort against Amazon, all under the pretense of protecting the mom-and-pop Main Street retailers. 

More next week.