Insights 9.05

Design:

• A fun and informative late summer post from designer-engineer Mario Bollini on how he went about putting together the perfect adventure bike. It's a good reminder that the market is pretty bad at providing the level of specificity real people want from the objects in their lives, and that we can and should augment, alter, and add affordances to our fabricated world as we see fit. 

Energy: 

• WBUR peers into the the New England grid's latest addition: a whole heap of lithium-ion batteries intended to help smooth the peaks and valleys of electricity supplied by renewable tech like solar and wind power.

Labor Pains: 

• A tale of two eras from the New York Times, and how the upward mobility of labor has been choked down by enterprise-level efficiency squeezing out the space that once served as a tiny foothold on the corporate ladder for ambitious workers. 

Building Things: 

• DuPont is stepping back from the plastics that helped them build their massive multinational chemical conglomerate. 
• More and more, fading software-support is leading to tangible things having their value suddenly slashed. Spotify stopped supporting a wireless speaker we used for years at the office, and Microsoft ending support for their Windows Phone 8.1 is impacting 36,000 devices for the NYPD. It's reflective of the great promise gap between software PR and end-user reality: software companies speak of unlocking more and more value by moving bits, but when the overhead costs of product support swells, they're perfectly willing to render some atoms worthless. While it's easy to blame these stories on corporate greed and planned obsolescence, that's not always the case. Even the best intentions of designed longevity can go awry, as demonstrated by Fairphone's recent decision to end support (including repair/replacement module sales) for their first phone. A better, more easily maintained and improved future of technology likely won't come from big companies down to individual consumers, it will have to be a conscientious effort of people and communities to develop their own alternatives. 
• Increasingly, hardware startups with billion-dollar(+) valuations are based not in Silicon Valley, but in Shenzhen. For anyone who has been following hardware and manufacturing for the past decade, it's not at all surprising that the workshop of the world could quickly transform into the design and product marketing shop of the world as well. It's easy to imagine that in the not-too-distant future, some coveted, high-end tech object will be sought out because of its Made in China markings, not in spite of it. 

More next week. 

Insights 8.28

Design:

• Music production programs may contain the most intensely (and anachronistically) skeuomorphic interface designs of any professional software class. While the "honesty" of flat design has swept across many domains, music software remains a stubborn holdout that feels baroque in its artificial depth and rich gradients. While the current UI trend is minimal, flat, and loaded with white space, it seems wrong to dismiss these highly textured interfaces as bad just because they are swimming against the aesthetic currents of the moment. If it adds to confusion, then sure, those are bad interfaces - but in many cases the homogeneity of flat designs can be equally confounding. Rather than subscribing to any one set of visual conventions, designers should focus on making products and services work well for their users.

Machines for Moving: 

• Germany's Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure put out an ethics report on what actions autonomous vehicles should be able to take. Among the forbidden: in the case of an unavoidable accident, the decision-making software can't take into account age, gender, race or class of the potential victims. Also interesting is their position that liability concerns emerging from autonomous vehicle operation should put accountability on the product maker, which is basically in line with product liability standards for non-autonomous vehicles. 

Virtually There: 

• There's a new augmented reality app that will show you your dead loved ones at their gravesite. While it might feel a bit jarring as a sort of posthumous Pokémon Go, humans have always used their latest and greatest technologies to pay tribute to, and remember the dead. Social media platforms have struggled with the continued representation of the dead, whose portraits and vacation photos remain networked even after their corporeal body has been interred or turned to ash. Maybe it seems a bit crass to pay a monthly service fee to see the AR deceased hover above their own grave, but an internet that eventually forgets and fades the departed is in some ways more true to life: no matter how solid the monument or how significant the legacy, every life lost eventually fades to make room for the new ones. 
• Motion sickness is a big problem for widespread virtual reality adoption and content creators: to ensure users don't get ill, game designers have to dial down the most powerful effects. To avoid the predicament of thrilling many while sickening some, researchers are working on a "nausea dial" that would allow people to tune the VR experience to fit their particular physiological reaction. Let's hope they don't connect this dial to the internet.. 

Communication: 

• How Instagram's purposeful damming up of content flow ("link in bio") arguably makes for a better experience. 
• Nicole Nguyen at Buzzfeed looks at big U.S. tech companies attempting to bring high speed internet to every human on earth. It's not a new story, but she explains the subject exceptionally well (mostly in the video, FYI) and helps to tell the story of the many tangible tissues of wire, towers, and satellites that make up the ephemeral-feeling internet. 

Building Things: 

• Dragon Innovation, a manufacturing and logistics consulting services company in the Boston area, has been acquired by the electronics component distributor Avnet. It suggests that companies that have built their market power by supplying a handful of giant corporations are looking for ways to hedge their bets against those same giant customers being disrupted by scrappier, faster moving hardware startups. It's getting harder and harder to ignore the proverbial little guys. 

More next week. 

Insights 8.21

Design:

• A designer has built himself a (formerly) secret little studio underneath a bridge. While it's got performative portfolio fodder written all over it, it's also a lovely project that gets at real questions of untapped spaces, the informal social aspects of infrastructure, and how little publicly accessible space is legally accessible to the public- and for anyone who seeks solitude within a populous city it's a tempting daydream of what could be. 

Machines for Moving: 

• Leave-it-anywhere bike share programs sound great in theory: lots of flexibility for riders in a way that maps human activity instead of property developer interests, but the reality is more complex. Human transportation (whether packed subway car, traffic jam or cyclists jockeying in their narrow bike lanes) is more than a logistics problem- it's all about following a set of tacit social norms. Scott Smith has a thoughtful post about how the "leave-it-anywhere" bikes bring their own set of nudges and knocks to the fabric of our urban transportation landscape. Part of the complication here is the intrusion of private companies (who may or may not be scraping data and reselling it) letting public spaces get entangled in their systems without participating in those places themselves, only showing up, deploying a technology and running off. It's akin to Australia's problems of the cane toad, where an outside idea that's supposed to fix a pesky local problem only ends up supplanting it with it its own unique and unfamiliar headache.

The Engineered Earth: 

• We stumbled upon this series of CGI-enhanced photos from artist Dillon Marsh that depict the volume of the desired, extracted mineral in the context of the carved up landscape that came between prospector and riches. It's a simple premise but has a quiet resonance in demonstrating how wasteful and myopic our supply chains often are. As humanity steps toward near double digit billions it's easy to lose track of exactly how wide and deep our footprint of making has grown. The planet can support so much, but in the absence of stewardship the riches won't last long.

Energy: 

• An interesting article about how California's electrical grid (which has a significant amount of solar inputs) was tuned to deal with the short-lived shortage of the eclipse. 

More next week.