Insights 1.16

Design:

• The U.S. mint has unveiled a new coin design that will depict Lady Liberty as a black woman. As a small symbolic step for a nation that has largely failed to reckon with the deep social impacts of slavery and the suppression of civil rights, it feels both right and wrong. On one hand making the image of a black woman into a definitive icon of the U.S. feels like progressive representation. On the other, the coin is commemorating the Mint's 225th anniversary: a span of time that significantly overlaps with slavery, when currency was exchanged for human lives existing far from anything resembling liberty. 
• Boston-based Altitude is the latest design consultancy to get acquired, in this case by the massive professional services firm Accenture. Accenture is no stranger to deals like this, having acquired the digital design agency Fjord back in 2015. Presumably they feel good about the value added by bringing a team of designers into the fold, which may signal other large firms (like McKinsey, the business consultancy that bought up the studio LUNAR) to keep collecting designers in order to feel like they are staying competitive. 

Up in the Air: 

• Lily Robotics, the follow-me drone startup that excited future users to the tune of $34 MM in pre-orders has announced that it is shutting down and refunding those payments. While many sources cited high manufacturing complexity coming up against inability to raise another round of investment in time as the cause of death, other sources indicate that they were being investigated for false advertising and deceptive practices. In either case, it sounds like they fell for a temptation common to inexperienced founders: to present grand promises with confidence, while behind the scenes the technology challenges are far from solved and hope to attract big money will give you the engineering ammunition to make the smoke and mirrors real before anyone catches on. 
• The French consumer electronics company Parrot is laying off around 290 employees in its drone division, making it the latest to shrink back in the face of Chinese drone maker DJI's success (3DR decided to stop building their own drones and cut staff back in March of 2016, GoPro laid off around 200 employees in December after their drone recall). While China has been disparaged in the past for producing inferior quality goods and failing to truly innovate, the global dominance of the DJI brand over many others is a real indication that such a narrative is no longer valid (if it ever was). 

 

Labor Pains: 

• Almost all of the jobs created in Canada last year were part time. 
• Few politicians mention automation when they talk (or tweet) about manufacturing, likely because it's a complex subject where the typical promises of STEM spending or re-shoring won't necessarily make things better for the general public (e.g. add a significant number of jobs or reduce overall wealth inequality). The math for ensuring mass employment in the future is going to be very different, and politicians would do well to imagine an entirely different employment landscape, rather than riffing on old models. 

Engineering Communities: 

• The fragmentation of media enabled by the internet has reduced the odds that we share cultural experiences with any given person in our city, state or nation. The article laments this fact as yet another membrane of our individual filter bubbles, amounting to a comforting but dangerous haze between us and the truth of the world. What is missing from this take is that the wide river of television's mainstream (mostly depicting stories of white, middle class, heterosexual characters) was never for everyone. Now more than ever we need to find ways to build positive change on a foundation of common ground, but it doesn't feel like we all need to be seeing or hearing the same stories for that to happen. Values of cosmopolitanism, not cultural hegemony, will be the path for getting to what's next. 

Bias & Brains: 

• Two stories of sloppy product development processes leading to black people being rendered literally invisible to the products they are using: one in software, another in hardware. The ignorance of design and engineering teams building these products for a global marketplace is pretty astounding. If these teams were more representative, their massive gaps in understanding would be solved almost immediately.

More next week. 

Insights 1.09

Design:

• IKEA has a new joinery method for their tables that looks pretty slick, robust, and cheap to make at scale. Notably, this innovation was arrived at by prototype engineers rather than designers sketching out possibilities on paper. As a team of designers who started as fabricators, it's a type of knowledge development and transfer that makes a lot of sense to us but is fairly rare in an era of work practices kept in their respective silos. Frontline workers across a company, in any department, should have channels to suggest improvements (with commensurate rewards for good outcomes) and those that find their work at the upper end of the ladder a little too clean should have more opportunities to get their hands dirty.

Energy: 

• A California senator is introducing legislation that would require new construction projects to include solar panels. California's energy and environmental policies are often ahead of the curve and later adopted in some form by other states, so this will be a bit of policy to keep a close eye on as we move towards a more sustainable energy future. Assuming it goes through, it could also be a big win for products like Tesla's Powerwall battery for residential energy storage.

 

Building Things: 

• The Brookings Institute, the DC area thinktank (typically described as centrist or somewhat liberal) has a piece on the potential for the so-called Maker Movement to act as a sort of traditional manufacturing alternative and bolster economic opportunities for blue-collar workers in the United States. While it's a nice thought, their case is flawed in a few key ways: these digital-fabrication enabled craft practices are rarely just blue collar, the typical "maker" also has skills in engineering or design, that these craft practices tend to employ very small teams, and the majority of the people working in these makerspaces have well paid, white-collar day jobs and are not exactly examples of rising economic opportunities for displaced blue-collar workers. Perhaps the biggest flaw here is that the Maker Movement itself is nothing new, really a rebranding of the kind of serious hobby-to-small business design and build practices that have existed for many decades. Rather than suggesting substitutes for some never-was golden age of manufacturing, we should be discussing what the needs of our best future will be, and what jobs will be required to meet them. 
• The Atlantic with another view of manufacturing in the U.S. - essentially that the country lost the "bad" manufacturing jobs (low skill, lower pay, highly repetitive) but has kept, and grown "good" manufacturing jobs that require higher levels of training and an agile approach to making goods that change design rapidly or are highly regulated.
• Not one to be discouraged, Keurig is trying to turn the same "Keurig Kold" technology that powered their soda-machine flop into another product line, this time for alcohol. 

Virtually There: 

• Snap Inc has acquired an augmented reality company based in Israel called Cimagine that had been developing software capable of  mapping a room and adding objects like furniture to the scene. It's a logical choice for the Snap extending their AR domain from faces to include the very spaces we live in. 

Roadmapping the Future: 

• William Gibson's seminal novel Neuromancer (often credited with defining the cyberpunk sci-fi sub-genre) has felt like the near future almost since it was published in 1984, with its dystopian details of military hacking, designer drugs and reality TV. Tech writer Jon Christian revisits the text to search for clues as to when the story takes place, finding it feels dangerously like our present moment: caught between the grand promises of technology and the worst aspects of human nature. 

More next week. 

Insights 1.04

Design:

• A writer working as a chatbot designer discusses the challenges of humor, developing a digital personality, and the pitfalls of gendering AI assistants like Alexa and Cortana.

Energy: 

• Panasonic is looking to fuel Tesla's vision for a clean energy future by investing $260 million in a factory focused on photovoltaic products in Buffalo, NY. 
• U.S. officials say that a Russian hacking operation was able to get very close to the electrical grid via a Vermont based utility company. Infrastructure experts have been talking about the vulnerabilities of the grid in the U.S. for many years, but congress has been slow to fund projects designed to "harden" the grid with additional security technology. News like this may expedite such projects moving forward in 2017. 

 

Body/Image: 

• Facebook acquired The Eye Tribe, a Danish startup that has developed eye-tracking technologies, presumably to build a version of it into future virtual reality offerings via their Oculus hardware platform. For a company that derives growth from selling the eye-attention-time of users to advertisers, the possibility of having more detailed information on where exactly someone's eyes are at a given point or what emotion their face is revealing is of huge interest. Advertisers would love to have a more complete picture of viewer sentiment, and if Facebook can offer that it gives them a serious advantage over other platforms. How people would feel about their smallest movements being tracked and used for opaque marketing purposes is less straightforward.

Big Business: 

• Coca-Cola decided to shut down its Founders program that collaborated with startups and provided investment. We predict that many large corporate innovation projects rolled out in the last several years will see cutbacks or total shuttering in 2017, as the model has seen limited success. As with any product or organizational initiative, it's crucial to understand the "why this, why now" and when incumbents began chasing after startups it seems that few really knew how to generate meaningful results for themselves or the companies they were funding. On the other hand, organizations built from scratch to work with startups seem to be hitting their stride and expanding: hardware programs like Bolt, Highway1 and HAXLR8R, or the cleantech incubator Greentown Labs. In our opinion, most large corporations are better off tapping into these smaller, more agile groups instead of building their own internal programs.

Roadmapping the Future: 

• What futurists do, and why demand for their ability to prototype possibilities is rising.
• India's Prime Minister is pushing for broader adoption of a digital payment app to replace cash in that country, which is feeling the crunch of cash shortages and discontinued currency notes. Big policy changes that affect a country's culture (of privacy, payments or property) often get implemented during a crisis when options feel limited and acting quickly seems essential to avoid catastrophe. Once one country adopts an entirely cashless economy, others will surely follow the lead, as it tends to have some real advantages for governments in terms of tax collection and detecting criminal activity. But a cashless future isn't a guaranteed improvement for everyone: turning financial transactions into information has all kinds of privacy implications for the average citizen, and could give autocratic regimes even more powers of control by keeping them connected to the movements of purse strings at a household level. 

More next week.