Insights 3.06

Design:

• How digital tools and marketplaces are leading to greater variety and lower risk in designing and producing textiles. The stylistic trends mentioned in the article are also an indication that the glassy-smooth minimalism of the iPhone era is feeling stale and contradictory - the black and white expanses of space age surfaces have long signaled the optimism of scientific progress: that through embracing high technology we would transcend our base animal natures and enter a time of reason, peace and plenty, with our basic needs fulfilled so that we can focus on grand questions and rewarding pursuits. Technology has improved many things but in certain regards the world feels far less stable. A hunger for expressive aesthetics that call back to nature and the human hand instead of the sharp, smooth lines of the mechanically perfect is a natural response to the promises of technological progress going unfulfilled. 
• Some superb data visualization work from Brown University on statistics and probability.

Building Things: 

• A promising noncombustible, all-solid-state battery technology is being developed at University of Texas Austin. Batteries are one of the more complicated sustainability variables in a cleaner-energy future - current state of the art Lithium based batteries which rely on dirty supply chains and have stability issues especially over longer term use.  The road from promising research to widely-available commercial technology is a difficult one, but hopefully we will have a cleaner, safer alternative to Lithium-based systems in our near future. Side note: how awesome is it that this research group is headed by a 94 year old? It's never too late to contribute to a better future. 
• One of the worst consumer product recalls we've seen in a long time in terms of ratio of incidents to units in use: Ryobi leaf blower has had over 10,000 incident reports of fan blades breaking and flying out either end of the device out of ~120,000 sold. It would be great to see a tear down and analysis of the failure's origin, whether it was in design, engineering or manufacturing.

Automatons: 

• Always on voice-based interfaces like Amazon's Alexa and Google Home are relatively new (Apple's Siri is 5 years old) and a new generation is growing up with those devices as a consistent presence ready and willing to answer their questions near instantaneously, if imperfectly. While the article seems to be mostly concerned with manners and whether bots you can boss around will lead to making similar demands of people, maybe more concerning is that platform filter bubbles could begin forming even earlier in life. While there are benefits in terms of ease of use in voice interfaces, that so much is hidden behind the curtain makes it more difficult to discern quality of information when all answers are delivered in the same familiar and softly-authoritative voice. Given that sources are opaque, it might be best for these bots to take a step back and acknowledge a more limited range of expertise: help us to order pizza, set reminders, and cue up our favorite songs instead of trying to explain still-developing geopolitical stories. 

Body/Image: 

• A startup called Skelmet is using a scanning app and data analysis to design and print better-fitting sunglasses. They're continuing a trend of additive manufacturing being leveraged for bespoke goods like orthotics, or earbuds, but those business models haven't had the best outcomes, with pivots and shutdowns being common despite initial optimism about "mass customization." Rain Wang, one of the founders, says that as an Asian woman and serious athlete, she had a hard time finding glasses that fit properly. Hopefully Skelmet can figure out the business side and more people can have what they wear actually work for them.

Behavior: 

• A new study on trolling finds that the creatures lurking under the bridges of the internet are really all of us. While truly dedicated, malicious trolls exist (the kind of people responsible for doxxing, coordinating harassment campaigns, etc.) much of the ill will thrown about online comes from ordinary people. The study found some correlation of troll activities with time of day and week, suggesting that these anti-social behaviors may be as much about a bad mood finding a target as it is about genuine contempt. As more and more of our communication time is logged with keyboards and screens, a better understanding of how the means of conversation can impact discourse for the worse may prove key to unwinding our sharpest political divisions.

More next week. 

Insights 2.27

Design:

• Whether it's pre-cut fruit or fonts deemed aesthetically offensive there is a human tendency to dismiss a thing as worthless, self-indulgent, or frivolous without really considering the range of needs across the spectrum of humanity. The latest example in this good-but-misunderstood category to come to our attention is that the oft-derided typeface Comic Sans is incredibly useful for people with dyslexia. Another interesting one came from playing around with Snap Spectacles out in the world over the past couple of months. One day we met a man with a traumatic brain injury that has left him with poor short term memory, and he particularly struggles with matching names to faces unless he has repeat exposure. He was interested in using Spectacles to record introductions to new people and replay them; making these moments into permanent memories. While we may have a particular notion in mind of who and how will use the things we design and engineer, humans are great at adapting tools to address their own needs and will continually surprise us. It's also a reminder to strive for the most open-ended version of something, to enable people to make the choice best for them rather than taking the "father knows best" attitude of limiting options and preserving some faulty concept of product purity. If Snap made you upload content from their camera glasses directly Snapchat and share socially, it couldn't function as memory assistive tech and if a blogging platform won't let you choose your own font, your writing could be difficult for readers with dyslexia to access. 

Making Technology Work for Us: 

• Ian Bogost at the Atlantic has an excellent piece on how the use of sensors, automation and algorithms is upending previous configurations of how technology worked for people. There was once a pairing of functionality and affordance that would output some straightforward benefit. Now, toilets can flush themselves; saving labor but wasting water. Social platforms that thrive by selling ads develop for provocation first, pitting pockets of society against one another to boost engagement but reducing chances for cultural cohesion. Bogost argues that technology now has its own emergent, opaque agenda that is more likely to serve corporations and tech expansion than people. In the 21st century it's sometimes impossible to tell if we are using technology, getting used by it, or both. Looking at the past may help us design better for the future by working in a similar transparency of interaction and outcome (turn crank, paper is output at some easily understood ratio). 

Upgrading Ourselves: 

• A DIY kit for adding north-facing sensing to your body via an almost-implanted electronic widget (it can be mounted on top of sub-dermal piercings) being covered by Bloomberg Businessweek is probably the most cyberpunk story you'll see this week. 

Up in the Air: 

• A drone crashed through a window, entering an apartment in Manhattan on Saturday.

Roadmapping the Future: 

• Christian leaders and church organizations are unsure how to deal with their religion being sampled for a digital generation. Religious leaders quoted in the article speak of encountering new mutations of scripture reflective of a digitized and partially secularized congregation: millennials that are more likely to convert sacred texts into memes and share them on Facebook than attend morning mass. In some ways this mimics earlier anxieties regarding parishioners, where the possibility of reading texts for themselves rather than relying on interpretations from higher ups like priests and deacons was viewed as dangerous. Given the deep influence on public life and policy Christian churches enjoyed in the past, adjusting to a wold where mass culture and technology moves religious practice must feel even more unsettling. The long march of information towards total availability to all continues. Traditional arbiters of truth will have to find new ways of being useful and relevant, giving up gatekeeping in favor of curating, counseling or counteracting the whirlwinds of atomized data washing over laypeople.

More next week. 

Insights 2.20

Design:

• Netflix put out a new documentary series on design. The New Yorker has a piece that points out their framing of the design field is somehow simultaneously too broad (folding in architecture and photography among other things) and too narrow (no real coverage of say, interaction or service design) and errs on the side of boosterism rather than looking at the design industry critically. To be fair, it's difficult to be comprehensive in a handful of episodes but it is an odd melange to start with and after watching the series it's curious that the two industrial design episodes (covering shoes in one, cars in the other) fail to present any negative consequences (like sweat shops or climate change) of mass design and consumption. It's well worth watching, but we'd love to see more honest, deep conversations about design make it to the screen. It's possible celebrate the pleasures of design and its positive potential while also pushing for higher standards and more complete stories that account for externalities. 
• The Museum of Modern Art in New York has become a big supporter of well-designed products that began their lives on kickstarter, helping young companies continue sales through an unconventional retail channel: the museum store. 

Upgrading Ourselves: 

• Elon Musk says humans will need to become cyborgs to maintain relevance and avoid drowning in the rising sea of automation and AI. While the further integration of hardware and our bodies and brains is virtually guaranteed (see: pacemakers, IUDs, brain implants to reduce Parkinson's symptoms, etc.) the idea that embedded upgrades will become necessities for economic survival is fraught with ethical and legal issues. We already live in a world where the rules around exactly how we can use, hack, repair or alter technology are complicated, restricting our access to our everyday devices. If you combine intellectual property frameworks like those intersecting our basic human rights for bodily autonomy, along with the fact that workers being displaced by technology and struggling to find work will also struggle to find the means to afford such procedures, you have all the makings of a true moral quagmire. For the future to do more than echo injustices of the past dressed up in a shiny veneer of new technology, areas of development like this will require incredibly careful steps. Assuming there is a 'proper' way to engage with concepts like cyborg-laborers, there will still be deep impacts on culture and society, with real potential to permanently segment populations in ways we've never seen before. 

Engineering Communities: 

• Two approaches to dealing with housing shortages and providing shelters for the homeless in the Bay Area: one via direct action activism, and one based on constructing 160 square foot "micro unit" apartments that would rent for around $ 1,000/month. We're all for diversity of tactics when it comes to tackling big, complex problems, but transitioning from homelessness to paying rent of a grand a month seems like it won't do much to help out the most vulnerable residents of our cities. It's a bridge too far, and desperately needs more transitional design practices to close that gap. While the DIY shelters are arguably flimsy, ugly and unlicensed, they offer an immediate solution to keeping people dry and shielded from the winds. 
• After a period of time when "platform" companies attempted to remain agnostic and sidestep taking blame for the bad behavior of users, a few are now making an effort to be more accountable and take action. Backchannel has the story of NextDoor (a community message board/neighborhood watch for the internet generation) and their struggles with exacerbating racial profiling in communities. After pressure from the press and existing community groups, NextDoor made changes in UI/UX that have reduced complaints of profiling. Similarly, twitter seems to finally be getting serious about addressing the twin-headed beast of harassment and hate-speech on their platform. They recently rolled out a change that temporarily reduces the reach of users with abusive behaviors and constricts their ability to assemble ad-hoc mobs that harass specific targets. 

Branded: 

• Some background on the Keep Austin Weird slogan, how it's been adopted by other weird (or aspirationally weird) cities and the many attempts by others to commercialize it and cash in. 

More next week.