Insights 10.30

 Design:

• Existing somewhere between net art and Etsy, the dank meme creators of 'weird Facebook' are finding ways to monetize their oddball memes through the old-fashioned method of culture signaling: wearable merch. 

Seen/Unseen: 

• For all the hype surrounding neural networks, with promises of ever-wiser AI taxonomists capable of churning through millions of images and 'understanding' them, such systems remain very gullible and easily led astray. A new study from researchers at Kyushu University in Japan demonstrates a single pixel technique that is quite effective at thwarting today's state of the art.  
• TechCrunch talks about why Snap Inc's Spectacles product has seen poor continued engagement and slow sales. Some reasons we agree with: an uneven roll out, with a murky transition from vending machine exclusive to e-commerce, while other claims miss the smart design decisions of the product such as not offering a clear or prescription lens option, which we viewed as a very conscious choice to limit their indoor usage, negating much of the creepy privacy eroding feel that plagued Google Glass (which the same author pegged as such a potentially successful product that Facebook and Apple ought to team up to fight it off). Wearable technology is a particularly difficult category, with big problems to solve in both the technical and social aspects. 'Smart' glasses or other consumer technologies are always easier to understand the shortcomings of in hindsight, but it seems that Snap Spectacles shifted the conversation somewhat, even if it fell flat commercially. 

The Engineered Earth: 

• After decades of often looking the other way on mega-infrastructure projects and special economic zones, China's government is determined to clean up pollution, even if it means shuttering many thousands of factories. These sudden closures have led to ripples in the supply chain, but disrupting commerce to save health, and ultimately lives should be an easy trade to make. Additionally, the government has introduced a policy to curtail the production of petroleum powered cars, with a clear aim to eliminate them entirely down the line. These efforts taken together are in stark contrast to the current environmental policy shifts underway in the United States, where EPA regulations have been rolled back and international efforts like the Paris Agreement scrapped. While the late 20th century saw fears of the U.S. and European nations falling behind in manufacturing and economic power, the 21st may be where China steps into a leadership role on environmental policies. 

Just A Game: 

• The U.S. military is hoping to glean tactical advantage from understanding how thousands of soldiers in simulated combat would use weapons and reconnaissance technologies not yet in existence. Beyond predicting how future weapons would be used, there's speculation that such a program of play-testing prototype war machines in digital spaces could cut Department of Defense costs, by signaling which projects are unlikely to bear fruit and cut them off before the big checks get written. 

Material Culture: 

• Roxane Gay on tiny homes, and what they say about the American Dream, our class aspirations, and our economic anxieties. 

More next week. 

Insights 10.23

Design:

• When it comes to mass-customization, enabled by additive manufacturing and other automated processes, the limiting factor is no longer the means of production, but the means of creating the machine input. In the past getting the object you want has required CAD skills, commissioning someone with them, or accepting a rather narrow range of outputs from scripted tools. A research paper from Nobuyuki Umetani presents a compelling 4th choice: a highly tunable interface for developing a model that is derived from training the tool on an existing data set. Creating such a bounded "play space" for generating new forms seems like the most viable option to date, offering a plethora of options with minimal expertise required. Perhaps most critically for business, the practice would allow them to preserve a specific corporate or designer style by limiting the development data to their own assets, preventing the errant ugly object from sporting their logo, implying approval without meeting their lofty aesthetic standards. 
• 'Eating your own dogfood' or using product or service company employees as user testers fails as an adequately deep method of research and development because the wide world of real life users is far more varied and complex than even a very large organization can really represent.

Body/Image: 

• Police body cameras have increased the clear documentation of excessive force and extrajudicial killings, but despite the high-fidelity mountains of evidence that they provide, there's faint signal of any meaningful change in how cops engage with communities. Time and time again, the U.S. position of envisioning an optimized technological future sets up the solutionist trap: that if we can simply deploy the right widget, we can undo deep systemic problems of culture and politics that have plagued generations. The reality of course is more complex, with real solutions requiring more powers of political will than powers of computation. 

Engineering Communities: 

• China is undergoing an unprecedented social-engineering program that is almost literally straight out of the tech-dystopian series Black Mirror: a universal rating system to grade citizens, with a score impacting everything from credit lines to employment opportunities. For now, this is an opt-in system, but there are explicit plans to make it mandatory in the near future. 
• The strange story of Minnesota's attempt to build an experimental city from scratch, seeking to solve complex urban planning issues in one fell swoop. 

Building Things: 

• The filament based variety of 3D printing is often what first comes to mind when picturing a 3D printer: a thin rope of plastic being pushed through a heated nozzle and deposited as a molten bead of plastic. While there have been huge technological leaps in the last 5 or so years for non-extrusion based printers, like the expanding material libraries for SLA machines, extrusion systems have lagged behind. A new ‘micro-extruder’ that works with pelletized plastic in a manner similar to injection molding machines is aimed at changing that, opening up new material options (many plastics are difficult to convert to a robust filament but are easily pelletized) and increasing the rate of printing, delivering up to 20 lbs. of material per hour to the printhead. While resolutions and step lines will likely be comparable to existing filament systems, the combination of speed and expanded material selection could make it a compelling tool for production of certain end use industrial components.
• A good profile of Fanuc and its history, the company that creates machines to make almost anything (including their renowned Robodrill line of milling machines, which power some of Apple's manufacturing lines). The media tends to focus on the charismatic megafauna of the robotics world: fancy multi-axis arms, humanoid robots, AI that experiments with crafting images, but the real heft behind automation are the boxy manufacturing cells produced by companies like Fanuc: the stout, reliable constructions that are more reliable, unrelenting, and exacting than any human worker. The company's long history of numerical control developments that underpin automated fabrication means that more than half of industrial robots (including their competitors) are driven by their systems. In an increasingly automated future, few companies seem better positioned to benefit than Fanuc.
• Regina Dugan is leaving Facebook after running their consumer hardware program Building 8 for less than two years. Prior to joining Facebook, Dugan was in charge of Google's ambitious ATAP group, known for pursuing some fairly oddball hardware products that were met with almost equal parts wide-eyed praise and dismissive criticisms. Whatever she does next, it's almost certain to be big enough to cast ripples throughout the world of hardware.

More next week. 

Insights 10.16

Design:

• Debbie Chachra on how Twitter's design has served to empower marginalized voices but also give rise to terrible patterns of chronic harassment. 

Communication: 

• A brief look back at the now-departed AOL Instant Messenger, and the ways in which it prefigured later, greater, social network mechanisms. 
• Snap Inc, perhaps the social media company that has been most aware of how visual culture and media technologies merged with our modes of communication, is developing a new feature that aims to continue those trends while performing an end run around Google's text (and voice) search business. They're calling the new feature Context Cards, an image/video first sort of search that surfaces information based on, well, context. This effort, along with Snap Spectacles and Snap Maps, is very much about connecting cameras to the world in more of a moment-to-moment sense, rather than the capture, share, and wait for the likes to roll in style of Facebook and Instagram (notorious themselves for quickly cloning many of Snap's visual innovations). More and more Facebook feels like a shoebox of nostalgia, a somewhat insular cul-de-sac of things you already know about people you already know. Snap is attempting to, if not always succeeding, build a social network that is more exploratory and amorphous. The business model may not be as clear as it is with Facebook and Google, but they have shown serious commitment to a deep strategy that is playing out over years, a lifetime by software startup standards. 

Humanity Intersecting Technology: 

• New research that suggests the development of online dating is fairly dramatically changing how we find love and who we find it with. As writer Alexis Avedisian has wryly put it: "we met through an algorithm." 

Labor Pains: 

• As income inequality grows larger and seemingly more intractable in the U.S., private market "solutions" spring up to (profitably) deal with the realities on the ground. From Reagonomics era to the post-NAFTA years of atrophying labor power, the de facto provider for working-poor consumer enablement was Wal-Mart, the behemoth everything store. But times have changed and the overhead costs of maintaining massive brick-and-mortar business doesn't work as well in the less populous pockets of rural America. Instead, a smaller, scrappier retailer has been on a growth spurt around the country. Dollar General, with more U.S. stores than Starbucks, has taken up the mantle of chief discounted goods purveryor, with fewer offerings but shorter distances between the struggling worker and the stocked shelf. The article details a value-proposition that is societally pessimistic: that for the foreseeable future there will be a large contingent of half-desperate shoppers struggling to make it between paychecks, looking to stretch a dollar to its breaking point. 
• Almost a decade later, the global economy is still dealing with ripples of the 2008 economic crisis, born of many hubris-filled moments, with the largest and most egregious ones focused on housing. Today, how best to deal with space, place, and the difficulty of putting down roots in a tumultuous labor market is still very much an open question. Pacific Standard has an interesting bit of reporting around the growing trend of "Workampers" or workforces that self-deploy to active areas in fleets of RVs. Amazon has a program called CamperForce to specifically engage with (or take advantage of) this great unmooring of labor from place. While migrant or itinerant labor forces are not unique to the 21st century, this particular incarnation is different, in scope and in context. 

Material Culture: 

• On how some 'lifestyle minimalists' have turned their less-stuff philosophy into a near self-help system, appealing to anxious careerists left unfulfilled by keeping up with the Joneses and aspirational consumers beaten down by mountains of credit card debt and clutter. In hyper-consumer societies, where the goods you keep are as much to construct and reconstruct one's identity for yourself and others, any rejection of stuff can feel radical. What's interesting about the consumer-economy flavor of minimalism is that it often still requires the consumption steps: it is a anti-materialistic practice based in gorging and purging, rather than avoiding it in the first place, a born-again approach to living with less. If socially, personally, or environmentally we are to reap the benefits of curtailing rampant consumption, it must be more proactive and complete rather than reactive. 

More next week.