As clear as possible: April 2020

System Failures and Interventions

“You know, I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like for you. But I can tell you this: It won’t fail because of what I do.” Mattingly realized the reason Apollo worked at all was because thousands of people had said to themselves, “It won’t fail because of me.” (from A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, by Andrew Chaikin)

In the last newsletter, I wrote a bit about the work the engineering team I'm on at my day job does within a hospital context: developing simulated tissue, organs, limbs, and bodies to better train surgeons, nurses, and other healthcare professionals. Since then, unsurprisingly, the team has shifted to 100% Covid-19 mitigation efforts, ranging from facilities adjacent projects to PPE and other devices; the day job is now also a nights and weekends job.

Medical device development, engineering, and manufacturing work is notorious for being loaded with paperwork: FMEA (failure mode and effects analysis), traceability, quality management systems, and ISO standard after ISO standard. That cumbersome set of tasks became best practice for good reason: the stakes in the medical world are life and death, and the interactions of systems within healthcare and patient treatments are as varied and complex as anything under the sun.

Even in times of crisis, for every prototype, there are far more plans, reports, FMEA documents, and detailed instructions for use.

Or at least there ought to be. That many of the eager DIY medical and PPE device projects emerging in the last month or so lack those elements is a big concern, and a topic I plan to cover in greater depth whenever life drops back down to more typical levels of chaos and challenge.

As systems scale, their failures can too, a ripple at a local level is a tsunami at a national one. Tsunami-scale failures warrant changes in tactics, but wholesale jettisoning of protective processes and careful planning is a sure recipe for further pain. There are lessons from the history of space programs, where the stakes are life and death, but the course of action cannot be fully simulated in advance.

From a review of the Chaikin book I quoted at the start of this intro:

With regard to Apollo 13 in particular, Chaikin shares the ingenuity that enabled the astronauts to return alive after an oxygen tank exploded on the ship, resulting in a life-threatening buildup of carbon dioxide. They solved this problem by constructing an air purifier out of cardboard from a flight plan book, two lithium hydroxide canisters, a couple of plastic bags, and some tape.

Chaikin shows that this solution involved more than on-the-spot ingenuity. Solving this and other problems they encountered was made possible by a great deal of earlier thought given to “what-if” scenarios. As Ken Mattingly, one of the astronauts at mission control during Apollo 13, observed, “Nearly every solution the teams were coming up with had already been thought of, and sometimes even tested, on previous missions”

In times of crisis, action is urgent, but care must persist.

We must find ways to move fast, without breaking things.

Design:

• An amazingly comprehensive yet succinct primer on complex system failures from Richard Cook at University of Chicago. Anyone endeavoring to design or engineer for any kind of critical system should be intimately familiar with systems thinking, complexity, and the unfortunate fact that failure of some kind or another is inevitable.

• A design history of various face masks to prevent contagion, leading up to the iconic disposable N95 respirators that are now in exceedingly high demand.

Building Things: 

• There's a torrential of stream articles and stories about supply chains and their issues these days, and it's difficult to pore over them all. I recommend this one by Lizzie O'Leary as a 101 style-read, straightforward but peppered with useful facts and anecdotes that even seasoned manufacturing folks may have forgotten about China's rapid eclipsing of U.S. industry. Another worth your time, is this one from Farhad Manjoo, focused specifically on the shortage of protective masks in the U.S., as an outcome of negligent federal preparedness policies, the razor-thin inventory margins of efficient but brittle just-in-time business practices, and bad luck.

• Ingrid Burrington's piece on the material science difficulties of creating life-life human tissues as seen on HBO's Westworld series is an interesting read, and highlights some of the challenges I've seen in emulating skin, organ, and bones in the field of medical simulation.

• Maybe because most of us are spending far more time at home than ever before, this account of building a home by Simon Saris really stood out to me. Avoiding the default premium-mediocre choices so often made in new construction today is among the topics covered: "With all the advantages of technology, we rarely build beautiful everyday structures or objects...This seems to me some kind of primal mistake. Where gods may exist in history, they walk in gardens, temples, groves, and other beautiful places that we have built and sought out for thousands of years. If we have in some part stopped trying to build beautiful places and things, why have we done so? What forces have left the world?"

Mapping Markets:   

• A thought-provoking argument for a government-to-government market (G2G): "There's a kind of dogma that says that states are inherently less efficient than businesses, and there's something to the idea that states aren't often suited to competing head-to-head with the private sector—but there's not much evidence that it's the source of capital that affects efficiency. Rather—businesses are more often provided the incentives and competition that allow them to become near-perfect players in their spaces. By replicating a system of competitive dynamics within the state sector, it should be possible to approximate the dynamics that lead to efficiency in the private sector, without reproducing some of the more pernicious principle agent problems that contracting entails."

Social Beings:  

• What social signaling looks like when mediated by software. Kyle Chayka, writing for Curbed, riffs on this idea in the time of quarantines, how our carefully constructed online presences (and bring-to-work versions of self) can be summarily punctured by a few unfiltered Zoom calls: "In this brave new world, our home interiors are our new avatars, and they’re more honest than most."

More sometime soon. In the meantime, get in touch: andrew@cleardesignlab.co

As clear as possible: March 2020

Series and Parallel

For maybe the 3rd or 4th time in my life, I'm trying to learn how to work with electronics, to build up anywhere near the fluency with designing circuits that I now have with fabricating other physical objects.

A basic familiarity with electronics was necessary for all the consulting years—nearly every new product I worked on for clients had at its core a small collection of whirring, glowing, communicating circuitry. In all previous attempts at learning electronics, I had no real sense of what use I would put the skill to that was meaningful enough to propel me through the muddling amateur stages that come with learning.

Last year, I went to a repair clinic to connect with people in my community with broken stuff that they wanted fixed. Largely, people wanted things fixed for one of three reasons: sentimental value of an object, wanting to reduce waste, or economic need to get along with what they already have.

Fixing things, for me, is deeply satisfying work, a care practice for technically-oriented people.

I was able to fix a few things for a few people, but a huge percentage of the items that people wanted or needed repaired were failing because of some busted little electronic component at their core. To be of real service would require more than generalized knowledge.

I came away from that experience with a worthwhile motive, and this go around, for the first time, the information is sticking.

The mysterious abstraction of electrons zipping about invisibly, evidenced only by their work, is gradually giving way to a halfway decent mental model. Much of the time I think and learn by making (or imagining) connections or parallels between disparate things.

Electronics feel strangely lifelike to me. Activity is driven by a tightly packed engine, operating at a scale and logic that must be measured with instruments and inference rather than read plainly with plain eyes.

And like organic things, tiny changes in an electrical system can become the breaking point for the whole machine of it, the deep, stable thrum of a motor silenced when a tiny resistor fails.

At the ferociously miniaturized scale of a smartphone, the break points are far less clear. The glimmering devices can tap us into the pulse of the whole world at once, for better or worse, in one moment and turn to a cool black granite paperweight the next.

On a Monday night last month, one not-yet paperweight 1,500 or so miles away in Minnesota sent a text message out, alighting on one cell phone tower after another in no time at all, like a nerve signal to a fingertip, lighting up my not-yet paperweight here in Boston. The message was that my mom had a heart attack that afternoon.

After some tests, some imaging, some stents, she's doing fine.

It was very much one of those "if you hadn't come in when you did..." things, the blip of good fortune in the muck of bad. Sometimes you know when an odd pain is something more. But then again, maybe you don't, and it's all backwards justification, the human narrativising that reassures us of our power, agency, and wisdom or that a divine grace enrobes us, protects us from the stray currents and eddies that could turn it all off.

I think about life, death, and healthcare every day.

My day job now is as a simulation development engineer in a large hospital system. Occasionally the projects are medical devices, but mostly the work is about replicating the organic complexity of the body and its tissues in states of health, disease, damage, or repair. It's an inversion of typical engineering practice, where you take design intent and contort that as best you can to fit the limitations of manufacturing or cost targets. The goal is to recreate life with as much fidelity as possible, to better prepare surgeons and patients for whatever it is they will encounter.

Surgeons contend with an extreme form of repair. The same problems manifest in vastly different ways across different patients, the stakes are regularly life and death, the diagnostic tools are ever more capable but still rudimentary in the face of organic complexity. 

If you zoom in far enough, all you can see the frenetic pinballing of cells or electrons. That looks like the whole show. Zooming out you can see the tissue or traces, the body or the circuit board, and that appears to be the real outline of the thing, the true story. But both are. Differential diagnosis requires doctors to hold multiple viewpoints in consideration simultaneously. The small is part of the big, the big is reduced or restored by the small. Any system is nested within a larger one, and any large system is subject to disruption by the smallest components operating at its interior.

Surgeons know in short order whether or not not their interventions make a difference. Most of us though, will live and die without certain knowledge of how our actions changed things, whether we restored function to a failing system or hastened its decline through neglect. What is certain is that actions have impact, and we all share culpability in what stays broken and what gets mended.

The systems of the world have plenty of broken pieces, shorted connections, people in need of another person with the right skills and care. To move forward and make things better, we have to reckon with what seem to be conflicting and confounding truths, arrays of information broader and deeper than anything our ancestors were met with, and still decide on a course of action. 

What we can fix is small and big. It is in our hands, and out of them.

Design: 

• On the limits of design fiction, a type of speculative design practice.

Building Things: 

• A wonderful read from the features section of The Prepared about megaprojects and accretive building: "...most infrastructure projects (the dams and bridges that are focus of Ansar’s research) are binary. They are done, or not; a 99% complete bridge is not very useful. Cathedrals, one the other hand, are not binary. The aspiration may be much larger, but in essence, a single room could act as a cathedral."

• A profile of MSCHF, a kind of post-consultancy design/marketing/development firm. Of note is their treatment of products as projects, rather than offerings in a continuous marketing and sales strategy: “The cool thing that we have going for us is we set this precedent that we’re not tied to a category or vertical. We did the Jesus shoes and everyone knows us for that, and then we shut it down,” Mr. Whaley said. “We will never do it again. People are like, ‘Wait, why wouldn’t you double down on that, you would have made so much money!’ But that’s not why we’re here.”

Technology as a Threat: 

• A long read on both the illegal and illegal vaping industries after deaths were linked to the practice: "China removed Juul from stores. India banned vaping altogether. Federal prosecutors launched a criminal investigation. Walmart stopped selling e-cigarettes. Congress raised the legal age for buying nicotine to 21."

• Increases in plastic production could be offsetting emissions cutting gains made elsewhere.

Making Technology Work for Us: 

• An excellent piece from my friend Jenka on how interfaces and their design, can play a significant role in enabling or mitigating epidemic-level outbreaks.

1.2020

If you're a regular reader of the CLEAR design lab newsletter, you may have noticed that after years of weekly posts, there was an unannounced and unremarked upon hiatus.

That hiatus was due partly to straightforward factors (other responsibilities/projects stacking up) and partly philosophical ones: "Do I want to write this anymore?" "Is this practice advancing conversations or merely aggregating?" "What are insights without actions?"

"I" in this case, is Andrew Edman, the person that's been finding, linking, and commenting on these stories of design, technology, and manufacturing over the years.

After some thinking, questioning, and seeking, I have decided to keep the blog going.

There will be some changes in approach, frequency, and style that I hope will expand the usefulness of this blog for you the reader, me the author, and us, the communities we live and work within."

I want this blog to be a source of conversation and collaboration, rather than an one-sided communiqué. Here's to more connection in 2020; to seeing, hearing, listening clearly.

"That is what we have to do now, in the first days of 2020. Dream unashamedly big dreams, dreams that reimagine the more just and loving world we want to live in, not the one traditional science fiction or even the media suggests is inevitable. Put these dreams to paper, speak them into the world, and work together to make them a reality."

-Eric Holthaus, telling the story of the better world we can build

Designing Space:

• The highly personalized spaces of Ukrainian balconies: "During my research, I came across balconies where mushrooms were being cultivated. In Poltava, someone kept a pig on the balcony. Some years ago, in Dnipro, someone built a small swimming pool up there." The article and it's examples reminded me of a project from the speculative design consultancy, Superflux, called Mitigation of Shock, which they have recently rebooted/retooled for the context of Singapore. Mitigation of Shock is a (speculative) model of how an apartment household in a wealthy nation might reconfigure for survival in times of food shortage or supply chain ruptures, moving from pure consumer behavior to grower/hunter/gatherer.

• Open plan offices suck, but so do cubicles. Architect David Dewane wants employers to try something altogether different: "...workers move through five or six distinct zones during the day. Each space has a purpose, from socializing to research, allowing people to alternate between focused work and chances to recharge. The design culminates in individual “deep-work chambers,” intended for focus."

Building Things: 

• Decades of being the world's workshop has taken a toll on China's environment. In recent years, the nation has taken big steps to intervene in the damage, like shutting down tens of thousands of high polluting factories in 2017, and halting the import of low-grade recyclables with 2018's National Sword program. Now, China's regulatory bodies are turning their attention to metals mining, but many deep problems persist. The job of metal miner has displaced coal miner as the deadliest, and mining operations in the country sometimes abut agricultural ones, posing serious contamination risks.

Material Culture: 

• "Perhaps the longing for less is the constant shadow of humanity’s self-doubt: what if we were better off without everything we have gained in modern society?" Kyle Chayka's book on minimalism is out later this month, and you can read an excerpt over at The Guardian's website. There's something of a corrective minimalism, maybe even monastic desire that springs up in the form of New Year's resolutions: to cut back on this thing or that, or to be more thoughtful, disciplined, attentive. I think it's no coincidence that those common resolutions appear in the shadow/hangover of Christmas, the largest, crudest materialistic event in the U.S. every year. Minimalism, at least as it applies to stuff, seems to exist in a similar position, as an ethos of purification and structure to resist the ceaseless advertising and selling we are subjected to (and participate in) as part of modern life.

• A solid piece on personal brand and consumer behavior as we move into the twenties, from K-Hole's Sean Monahan: "We are desperate not to be the person in the subway ads: quietly aging with singleton roommates, paying for toilet paper fractionally through Splitwise. The advertisements anticipate what everyone already knows: the empty vessel theory of consumerism is on its way out. You can’t cobble together an identity out of purchases. At best you can buy your way out of the question all together. Uber is a way to not buy a car. Airbnb is a way to not stay at a hotel." Like Chayka, Monahan underscores the fading power of stuff or our aversion to what it's meant to signify, at least according the brands and advertisers trying to convince you it all still has some juice. His analysis diverges from Chayka's, where the minimalist's rejection of stuff is part of a pseudo-spiritual, practice of mindfulness, and instead suggests that stuff, and selecting it (however thoughtfully), is a meaningless bore, and that increasingly, we couldn't care less about the specifics.

Making Technology Work for Us: 

• Recently, I've been thinking about the "death valley" or maybe just a "death era" for industrially-produced goods: the point at which manufacturing methods became too convoluted to avail themselves the average, or even above average repair person. It's fairly straightforward to fix appliances from the 1950s, for example, but near impossible to remedy many of the more modern, miniaturized failure modes of goods with digital components. Whether it's digital cameras or cutting-edge tractors, if you want something that can be made to last, with or without the original manufacturer's blessing, olden is golden. In the case of tractors, farmers are actually seeking out old models for their superior repairability.

More sometime soon.