Insights 10.09

Design:

• While many stories on product innovation these days hinge on data, connectivity, machine-enhanced analytics or some other bit of circuit-board derived magic, the truth is that there are still so many basic objects in our world that are woefully bad and warrant deep re-design effort on a more basic level. This piece from WIRED is about one such object: the speculum, a medical inspection tool used by obstetrician-gynecologists that is notoriously awful. Some designers sought to create a new device to improve patient experience by harnessing the right mechanical structure and materials, no circuit boards or algorithms required. 

(Dis)Trusting Technology : 

• Mattel has canceled their Amazon Echo-like product for kids, citing widespread criticism around data privacy and concerns about negative impacts on child development. Following the mega-scale data breaches in recent years (Target, Yahoo!, Equifax & others), it's clear that virtually any data stored remotely is potentially vulnerable. If worries about child privacy were enough to sink Mattel's product, why should similar products focused on adults (but certainly used in households with children) not suffer a similar societal rejection? 

Body/Image: 

• Amazon has acquired the startup Body Labs, which had been developing technologies to capture "true to life" 3D models of people's bodies for purposes of health tracking and more perfectly fitting garments (one of their projects was with the U.S. military to create better fitting body armor for female soldiers). Combining such technology with the deep pockets and sprawling reach of Amazon is a big step for the mainstreaming of mass-customization, which had been a periodic value-proposition claim of 3D printing companies, with little success to date (outside of acute needs like patient-specific medical devices). Without an easy and accessible market for purchasing customized goods, being able to produce them was an achievement without an outlet. This acquisition and Amazon's recent streak of investments in fashion tech could be a huge step in that equation getting balanced out. What's less apparent is whether this promising move towards accessible mass-customization will be an Amazon-takes-all approach, or be a trend enabled by a multitude of smaller technology companies. 

Energy: 

• Without government subsidies and tax breaks, around 45% of current oil-extraction initiatives in the U.S. would be unprofitable given recent petroleum prices.

Material Culture:

• The fascinating directory of restrictions on what you can sell via Amazon. On the no-go list: artworks that could be construed as archaeologically or anthropologically important, testosterone testing kits, GPS jammers, shurikens, coin-operated slot machines. 

More next week. 

Insights 10.02

Design:

• "But the nature of style is to fade." Kyle Chayka on the history of the Four Seasons restaurant, it's aspirational style and its recent attempt at a redesign. Among the themes here is that the aesthetic-of-affluence flavor of modernism that once flowed from Manhattan to everywhere else became greatly Spartanized by minimalism, stripped of its more opulent touches. The once fresh, now aged Manhattan style synonymous with Madison Avenue advertising executives feels entirely too self-serious and aloof for our present moment. The looming threats of our era, combined the shrinking of the globe through intensified travel and trade have made such American modernist bluster seem oddly trivial and provincial. 
• On building a design system within a fast-moving startup to align (and preserve) engineering and design efforts. 

Communication: 

• Facebook's first major consumer hardware product is due to launch in early 2018, (a video chat device similar to Amazon's Echo Show) but there are rumors coming from the social media giant's product team that the general public doesn't feel so comfortable with the idea. Facebook's outsized impact on shaping new cultural norms of privacy in this 21st century has made them incredibly powerful, but it has also made them the symbol of all we fear about social networks, context collapse and surveillance-as-a-business model. 
• The Outline with a good piece on the role of small, private group chats as a refuge from more public forms of social media, the news cycle, and as a place for people of color in particular to share the pains, humor, and experiences just with those people that really understand.  

Big Business: 

• Amazon and Google are feuding more openly than usual, with Google dropping YouTube streaming support for Amazon's products, leaving the e-commerce and web services giant with a significant hole in their offerings. As tech giants absorb smaller stars and form a new constellation of competitive monopoly powers, people are left with a choice between spotty service or costly but marginally more valuable redundancy, the same bad equation from older telecom and cable companies that tech firms were supposed to disrupt on behalf of customers. 
• IKEA has acquired TaskRabbit, the sometimes controversial gig-economy labor on demand app company. While the article's headline claims it's some reflection of America's DIY spirit dying (really? do we consider IKEA furniture assembly as reflective of scrappy DIY ethic?) it's really just a classic business case study of finding an interesting and potentially undervalued organization that can add to vertical integration efforts. If many of TaskRabbit's customers were using the app for furniture assembly, why would IKEA not want to collect those extra dollars with some software engineering talent and troves of data to boot? 

Material Culture : 

• A strange and somehow quintessentially U.S. story of a man who had prepared for doomsday over the course of decades, only to lose his wife and his home, then going on to donate those hoarded goods to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
• Bruck: what Scottish islanders call the scrap and detritus that ends up on their isolated lands, the trash you might talk in a bar, or the odds and ends that are basically useless but you haven't brought yourself to get rid of.
• It's well known that the smaller bits of human-made stuff litter the oceans, but less known that our plastic bits become tiny seafaring vessels for creatures, enabling even the fragile ones to make the long journey across the Pacific Ocean. Civilizations have always had a trash footprint, and our languages and cultures evolve ideas to capture that unwanted segment of progress we seem to be surrounded by. From junk drawers to doomsday vaults, we collect, re-arrange, discard, and restore objects large and small, trying to make sense of what kind of world we ought to be building, what kind of life we ought to be living. For better or worse those objects that surround us are a reflection of our sometimes composed, but mostly messy lives. May we have the wisdom to know what to give, what to give up on, and what it is we really need in the first place.

  

More next week. 

Insights 9.25

Design:

• A good article (despite the clickbait-y title) on the trials and tribulations of printing metals on a large scale. While printing large structures is impractical for many reasons, there are specialized cases where the weight-savings can add up to enough cost savings to make the whole strange endeavor worthwhile. Just as the availability of structural steel changed the look and shape of cities forever, avant-garde practices like 3D printing will make their (likely much smaller) mark on our aesthetic surroundings. 
• Automatic design solutions have been a perennial tech news story for many years now, and there's still little reason to believe they will fundamentally replace human designers any time soon. What this article notes correctly is that long before automation takes an industry or a profession, it speeds along the basics, replacing simpler human craft with decent work done by machines. This has two big impacts: reducing entry level positions, and reducing the nuanced lessons that come from doing a thing (even a small, simple task) in a hands-on, highly repeated way. 

Body/Image: 

• Amazon has apparently been developing their own take on "smart" glasses. So far the e-commerce and web services giant has enjoyed big successes with their Alexa-laden products, but for the most part their history of hardware has been littered with little-loved commodity style products, designed to reduce the distance between you and an Amazon order. Smart glasses and wearable tech in general has been an incredibly tricky puzzle (for technological and cultural reasons) that few companies have managed to even begin to solve. We're not optimistic that Amazon will be able to deliver something that provides enough value with minimal creep factor to be a big success, but they have almost as much bet-making money as any company could want. 

Big Business: 

• Swiss power & robotics company ABB has bought up one of General Electric's business units, hoping to be more competitive with their French rival, Schneider Electric. 
• A new program out of MIT is hoping to connect investors with companies that are working on technologies that have long and difficult routes of development, with R&D times far beyond what investors typically have the tolerance for. 

Our Weird Future: 

• Stray dogs in Thailand are being outfitted with camera vests that turn them into a roving surveillance system. The ways in which we instrument city spaces says a lot about our cultural values, fears, and philosophies of what it means to share space with strangers. What co-opting stray dogs as state snitches says about us... well, we're going to need to think on that for a bit. 

More next week.