Insights 2.13

Design:

• How W.E.B. Du Bois used data visualization to tell the story of black lives in America for the World's Fair in 1900. The hand-drawn and painted diagrams feel very contemporary in their ability to bring immediate visual clarity to complex information.
• The augmented reality startup Magic Leap has raised $ 1.39B of investment over the last 6 years, but limited demonstrations of the technology has led to questions of whether that money has produced real product value or if they are on the road to vaporware. This week a photo of a supposedly working prototype was leaked. It's... really big and fairly ugly, and quite far from a reasonable-looking piece of wearable tech. The CEO disputes the claim that the device depicted is a prototype, describing it instead as a test rig. We will have to wait and see if they can make good on their massive valuation. 

Automatons: 

• Hoteliers have been using robots for room service, and they'd like more, according to The Economist. Like restaurants, hotels have tight margins, lengthy service hours, low wages and are often dependent on undocumented workers and immigrants generally. With an uncertain future for immigration in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, there could be a shrinking supply of labor for hotels and restaurants in those countries, triggering a commensurate investment in automation for those industries. 

Feeding the Future: 

• Regular readers of this newsletter know that we are generally skeptical of "smart" products related to cooking, finding that they somehow manage to complicate simple tasks while preventing development of new skills and the pleasure of improvisation. Well, there's finally some cooking tech that looks genuinely innovative and useful from our perspective: a new type of oven using RF (radio frequency) to quickly cook multiple foods at different intensities of heat simultaneously. This apparently allows for some bizarrely precise operations, like their demo of cooking a fish within a block of ice. This could mean that making nutritionally complete meals from fresh ingredients becomes much more practical for busy people and families. And while you can imagine these devices being highly prescriptive ("run this program for your steak cooked to Anthony Bourdain's preferred level of doneness") it doesn't preclude experimentation which is a hallmark of technologies that augment human potential instead of making us more like automatons. That's the kind of futuristic thinking we can get behind.

Solutions from Down the Supply Chain: 

• Chance the Rapper became the first to win a Grammy for a streaming-only album, a notable milestone for independent artists and producers everywhere. While widespread internet adoption was supposed to unlock a direct-to-audience model where craft producers or creative visionaries could deliver their works without editorial meddling and aggressive fees taken out, that model is still more theoretical than practical. While this award is a big, visible crack in the foundation in the old way of doing business, the window of opportunity for independent creators to find an audience online (and success on their own terms) may be closing if net neutrality goes away. 

More next week. 

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.