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.