Insights 2.06

Design:

• With complex and highly dynamic interactions, cities are a constant source of inspiration for designers. Much of the design attention around cities in the 21st century has based in creating so-called smart cities via sensor networks and automation. Paris is testing out a solution combining high and low tech to combat the problem of public urination. The device is essentially an outdoor urinal (sans-plumbing) that turns straw, carbon, and urine into compost with internet connected sensors notifying city workers when straw needs to be swapped out. While it's not a pretty problem to think about, it uses a realistic mental models of cities and their inhabitants (warts and all) as a foundation and arrives at an intervention that could be highly effective instead of producing pretty PR fluff. 

Automatons: 

• In the late 1990s/early 2000s much was made of U.S. employment shifting from manufacturing to a service economy. There was a popular notion that outsourcing and automation made the repetitive manual labor of mass production a poor fit for U.S. workers, but that humans would still want or need to interact with other humans when it comes to buying insurance, a car or coffee. But globalized marketplaces quickly commoditized a huge range of goods and the move to e-commerce made us trust (or even prefer) transacting with our devices instead of our neighborhood shops. Add to the that falling costs of sophisticated robotics and we're looking at a coming wave of automation displacing human labor in service roles as well. Silicon Valley is betting on this trend with products like the Cafe X kiosk, a sort of robot barista. While retail based production-side robots have been rolling out for years now (for shawarma, for sushi, for ramen) the CafeX solution is notable for including sales and service functions as well, which leaves restocking and maintenance as the only obvious labor roles for humans to play.  
• On the software side of adding some automation into the coffee business, Starbucks is testing a chatbot that you can place orders with via voice or text. 

Building Things: 

• A story about a man who started producing the most popular goods on kickstarter, before the kickstarter project creators could ship them. When it comes to simple goods, the ease of connecting with qualified, low-cost manufacturers in China means that shooting first and leveraging a pool of existing cash to quickly copy can be a winning strategy, at least over the short term and if you can stay out of court long enough to cash your checks. It also means that knock-offs are a genuine threat to micro enterprises that have few resources to combat the practice compared to their big brand cousins. 

Machines for Moving: 

• Piaggio, the maker of the Vespa, has been running an innovation lab / internal startup in stealth mode for awhile now, and they just revealed their first project: a portly little robot that can carry 40 lbs. and follow you home from the store. It's an interesting and potentially very useful solution to the 'last mile' problems that complicate life for city dwellers. In particular, it could reduce the pain of getting fresh produce for those living in food deserts or help elderly folks maintain a high level of independence. And unlike self driving cars, which may disrupt the urban ecosystem for the worse, this machine fits with existing pedestrian and bike-friendly infrastructure. 

More next week. 

Insights 1.30

Design:

• The first new pistol for the U.S. Army in 35 years is built on a modular framework, in part to accommodate the wide variety of hand sizes among enlisted men and women. This has become a more significant issue over the years as the number of women in combat roles has increased. The U.S. military has a history of limited options to meet the needs of women, a sort of technical debt owing to being a gender-restricted organization for most of its existence. Equipment like prosthetics and boots originally designed solely for men have contributed to worse patient outcomes and higher injury rates for female soldiers. In a world designed for men, this is a step in the right direction.

Feeding the Future: 

• Rachel Stone, writing for Real Life argues that Soylent and SlimFast have more in common than being liquid meal replacements - they are both philosophical substances that "promise transcendence through self-denial," something of a filler that creates space for our flawed notions of improvement and optimization; morphing the body into a mechanically optimized vessel for productivity or arbitrary aesthetic standards. These meal-replacing, alternative foods are a strange invention of the 20th century: sustenance that is is devoid of cultural or geographic tradition, though they often reference those histories in their assorted flavor offerings. 
• A study by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation finds that unless production, recycling and waste management practices are changed, there will be more plastic (by mass) than fish in oceans around the world by 2050. This has big implications for ocean health generally and the quality of the aquatic food supply that many cultures are dependent on. Unfortunately, problems like this are connected directly to overly narrow "Design Thinking" practices that privilege business objectives or customer convenience over (sometimes literally) downstream effects that can be detrimental. If humans are to survive and thrive through the 21st century, we're going to need a more complete understanding of how our actions affect the entire system. 

Communication: 

• Friday was Holocaust Remembrance Day, and one twitter bot was built to send out tweets from the perspective of those who died in the tragedy after being turned away by the U.S., echoing the humanitarian crisis we are seeing today. The automatic and relentless posting of lives lost is a poignant use of technology to make the past feel present. 
• Our digitized social networks that help us connect at a distance also make us vulnerable to distributed harassment, but methods vary depending on cultural norms of privacy, value, and violation. This article from BuzzFeed details the practice of "meathooking" in China, where a continually broadening network of users gather information on a target, creating a sort of ad-hoc dossier. When building tools of any kind, it's important to consider how abusive users might pervert good design/engineering intentions, and do everything possible to mitigate those harms - a more complex task when developing products for a global user base. 

Virtually There: 

• Simulating a near death experience in VR may reduce our anxiety around death and mortality, at least in the short term, according to a recent study from the University of Exeter. VR may prove to be one of the most useful technologies for studying human consciousness.
• You can now (kind of) have all of Vermeer's paintings in your home, courtesy of the art-display startup Electric Objects and their subscription service. This includes "The Concert," which was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 and has yet to be recovered. While a reproduction has questionable value, power, and impacts on the original (just ask Walter Benjamin or John Berger) - it's hard to say that making such exclusive art so broadly available isn't a net positive. 

More next week. 

Insights 1.23

Design:

• A new design for football helmets using a series of replaceable panels that attenuate impact and reduce dangerous head injuries has found backing with a major manufacturer. It's expected to roll out with a handful of players in 2017. One thing potentially standing in the way of wider adoption is that the form of the helmet limits space available for logos - which is an unfortunate reflection of the competing priorities that designers run up against when developing a product that also has to meet desires of non-user decision makers. That universities would trade long-term health of players for more prominent graphics is a grim notion, but not altogether different from the discounting of the dangerous labor behind making so many of the beautiful objects we lust after. 
• Voice based interfaces like Amazon's Alexa are hugely popular but the secondary app marketplace that is supposed to help push usage up even more has a problem with discovery and retention, with people having a difficult time finding apps or their usage of apps falling off almost immediately. The design problem of learning what a limited system like Alexa "knows" is a significant obstacle for voice eclipsing graphical interfaces as the default for many tasks. Whatever the solution is, we think it's likely that adding apps or skills to a system like Alexa requires a heavily curated marketplace to avoid poor user outcomes.  

Up in the Air: 

• Anti-aircraft weaponry to combat (hypothetical) nefarious drones is in use at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Despite being referred to as guns many times in the article and captions, they don't fire any projectiles. Instead, the weapons jam electronic signals controlling the drone and cause it to loiter uselessly in the air, cut off from remote operation and unable to record video. The technology has been around for a bit, but recent reporting on expanded usage of consumer drones by ISIS for both surveillance and attack purposes is leading to an uptick of interest and deployment of jamming devices like these. This is part of the military technology cycle not often discussed: big defense spending often results in peaceful, commercial counterparts, but it also drives down the cost of some pretty sophisticated tech that can be re-purposed for guerrilla tactics. It's a great irony that the early adopters pay such a high price in dollars and development time for these innovations, only to have the cheap, toy versions thrown back at them. 

 

Automatons: 

• Terrestrial "drones" roll out in Washington D.C., their mechanical insides filled with things like burritos, pizza, or toilet paper. It's part of a partnership between gig-economy platform Postmates and the robotics company Starship. That autonomous machines are replacing human delivery in D.C. just as a President who talks frequently about reshoring (but rarely mentions how automation complicates the employment math of the 21st century) is an interesting juxtaposition.  It's also a complex situation for a company like Postmates to navigate: by spending time and money on automation instead of wages, they are increasing the animosity of the human labor force that they are still relying on. 

Touching Technology: 

• Hiawatha Bray at The Boston Globe with a story on reemergence of analog technologies. 2015 saw the largest expenditure on vinyl in almost 30 years, Kodak is back with a camera for shooting Super 8 film, and turntables powered by vacuum tubes are being manufactured anew. Though not analog in nature, even products like Fitbit live in the space of unnecessary throwback gadget: a software function that can run on your smartphone spun off into its own single-purpose tangible object. There are many reasons (both on the user and business sides) that analog or pseudo-analog devices persist even as "software eats the world" - one we talk about frequently is the deep evolutionary preference for the tangible, or the tendency to equate weight or smooth surfaces with value. In our always-on, networked world of information overload, the natural restriction of options that comes with analog (you can't have the range of albums on vinyl that Spotify offers, the ability to take unlimited photos presents problems of sorting and storing) can help to clear our minds a bit and help us to actually enjoy the experience itself, rather than being paralyzed by choices more vast than was imaginable. When the size of our systems outstrips our ability to comprehend them, it makes sense that we might choose to withdraw to something more knowable. 

Making Technology Work for Us: 

• On Being talks to Anil Dash about morality in a time when attention is bought and sold for the digital economy, contributing to the pushing and pulling of society by clickbait, fake news and feedback loops of twitter outrage fomenting anger. In particular, Anil Dash critiques the lack of ethics training in computer science education and how that contributes to dark patterns of data visualization and interfaces that make society a little worse off in the bargain. He offers some solid advice on how might re-make the tech industry to be more humane, and restore some of the good without reverting to an unplugged era. 
• The ad-hoc, choose-your-own-adventure nature of the internet has transformed political thought and action in ways that are hard to comprehend, much less control. The surprise election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the U.S. and the risks of filter bubbles on national discourse are indicators of those structural upheavals brought by the internet, but so are events like the Women's March that took place this past Saturday. Originally planned as a demonstration in Washington, D.C., the idea spread globally and protests were seen from Topeka, Kansas to Antarctica. By some estimations it was the largest protest in the history of the United States, and it all took place without one central organizing body, political personality, or interest group. While some nations are scrambling to turn more regressive, edifying borders and attempting to codify nationalism, people in the aggregate will always strive to be more free and use whatever tools and technologies available to them to make that vision a reality. 

More next week.