Insights 11.27

• Unlocking more unique design possibilities for common objects may be what propels 3D printed consumer goods into the mainstream, years after the peak of the hype cycle. Fast Company profiles Gantri, and their 3D printed lighting products. 

Feeding the Future:  

• Some fascinating graphs and explanations for changing food consumption trends in the United States, like how World War II impacted American appetites for ice cream and mozzarella, or the incredible rise of chickpea consumption as more people developed a taste for hummus. Today's mix of factors that may have long shadows of influence on the American diet: reduced meat consumption by non-vegetarians, and trade wars that are impacting the price of imported/exported agricultural products, skewing the cost of raw materials for all kinds of prepared foods. Changing food habits takes a good deal energy to overcome cultural inertia, but once they do change, they tend to be equally difficult to break. 

Building Things:  

• In theory, higher wage countries should be purchasing the lion's share of industrial robots, as the return on investment is much faster. In practice, manufacturers in lower wage countries (Thailand, China, Mexico, etc.) are  purchasing industrial robots at a rate far outstripping the U.S. and Western Europe, when a wage-based approach to measurement (rather than the more common industrial robots per X number of workers measurement) is used. Put another way: manufacturers in lower wage countries are adopting industrial robots much more quickly than they are 'supposed' to be. 

Body/Image:  

• Among the topics in a wide-ranging conversation between Jaron Lanier and E. Gwen Weyl, is how simulated experiences, like haptics and VR, can help to learn more about the long, sensory lineage embedded in our brains: "...the notion that you could radically reorganize the body and the brain could still control it was not something that could have been tested before. And it is remarkable. One thing that's probably going on is that the brain remembers body forms that our ancestors inhabited, because as far as the brain is concerned evolution is a slow, gradual process. So the brain remembers what it was like to have a tail."

• According to Cheddar, Snap Inc. is working on yet another generation of their Spectacles products, this time with a camera on both sides of the frame. Stereo cameras should enable Snap to overlay the kind of augmented reality filters their chat app is famous for (and other companies have copied) onto first-person video clips. Given the pace of their hardware product development, and the incremental, in-market approach they are taking, it seems clear that a full AR product is coming down the pike in the not too distant future. 

Labor Pains: 

• Samsung has admitted fault, and agreed to settle a long-running lawsuit from employees and their families. The lawsuits allege that exposure to chemicals at the company's manufacturing plants led to cancer, death, and permanent injury for numerous workers. This case (and Samsung's admission that it failed to do enough) is a reminder that the futuristic aura of the bright, shiny new objects we consume is sometimes a veneer, obscuring the dirtier realities of manufacturing and global trade, and the horrible compromises on worker safety that are all too common. Other sources on that same story say that the Samsung is refusing to disclose what the chemicals linked to these illnesses are, citing the need to protect trade secrets.

Social Beings:  

• In defense of the food photos all over the internet: "So why are we obsessed with sharing pictures of our food? Because it’s decidedly human. It brings us all a little closer, if only through a shared appreciation of our best meals."

More next week. 

Insights 11.21

Design:

• Few 20th century designs more quintessentially represent Americana than the shiny aluminum Airstream trailer. Fast Company has an article looking at where the brand is now, and how they have changed their design language (and marketing tactics), to keep the dream of open-road nomading alive. 

Building Things:  

• According to a new study from Deloitte, approximately half of the 4.6 million manufacturing jobs that will be created in the next ten years will go unfilled. Deloitte cites a combination of factors: waves of retirement, a lack of the right skills in new workers, and a general disinterest in manufacturing professions from younger generations.

• Autodesk's team of R&D engineers and designers recently unveiled "the most complex generative design ever made,"  which while hard to define, is a definite signal of how far generative design tools have come. This example, as many of those we've seen to date, is from one of the handful of industries (aerospace, medical, specialty automotive) that regularly need high-value, high-cost components well-suited to generative workflows and 3D printing as a final production method. As the cost of 3D printing falls and part quality increases, expect to see the of frequency generatively produced designs to go up. That bet on greater ubiquity of generative parts is being made with real dollars by some of the CAD industry's largest players, with PTC acquiring the generative design software startup Frustrum for $70 MM. 

Data Logging:  

• People with sleep apnea, frustrated by treatment plans that fail to improve symptoms significantly, have turned to hacking their CPAP machines in pursuit of better health outcomes. Patients complain that while there are useful datasets pumped out by the machines, most doctors spend little to no time analyzing the data and adjusting treatment accordingly. Instead, medical practitioners seem to be principally concerned with checking user compliance for insurance purposes. Doctors understandably want to limit tinkering that could lead to patient risk and malpractice issues, while end-users might be more comfortable making small adjustments grounded in their experience. On the other side of data access and privacy, ProPublica reports on a CPAP machine user that believes their usage data was shared to their insurer without their permission, and that data used to deny them coverage. 

Automatons: 

• Universal Robots has hired 20 or so employees of the now-defunct collaborative robot company, Rethink Robotics, and is taking over their old space. 

Mapping Markets: 

• Ben Kaufman, the founder of the failed crowd-sourcing product company Quirky, has been employed by BuzzFeed since October 2016. While there were a couple of oddball, Quirky-esque hardware products launched from that brand in the past few years, it was a bit of a mystery what a tangible product guy was doing on BuzzFeed's payroll. It turns out that Kaufman has been working to turn the masses of data that BuzzFeed gleans from its readers into product concept pitches that can be brought to companies that advertise on their website. While the idea of a media outlet using its readers to help find product market fit for advertisers is novel, and potentially effective, it presents a host of conflict of interest issues. Primarily, there's the question of a media company having a vested interest in stoking the fires of consumerism in their readership, versus say, being strictly informative. 

More next week. 

Insights 11.13

Design:

• P&G was criticized for the candy-esque appearance of Tide Pod packaging, which were a legitimate hazard for children and adults with dementia (and then became a bizarre challenge meme for teens). Now a new concept for a Tide detergent dispensing box is bringing out snarky comments about its parallels with boxed wine. 

Machines for Moving:  

• Ford Motor Company acquired the app-enabled electric scooter company Spin. The automotive industry has a sketchy history when it comes to dealing with non-car transport options, so this event either portends stifling of non-car solutions, or a real embrace of a multi-modal future where cars are merely a piece of the larger puzzle. 

• Creating safe, self-driving car systems has proven more problematic than tech journalists were prophesying in past years, but autonomous vehicle companies are convinced that heaps and heaps of data will ultimately make the self-driving cars and trucks far safer than keeping humans behind the wheel. The irony is that the capturing, cleaning, and categorizing of that data requires human judgement. The BBC reports that among the labor steering the direction of data for autonomous vehicles, are hundreds of workers in Kenya, paid $9 a day by an outsourcing firm working with Silicon Valley startups. While those are (perhaps shockingly) not the lowest wages in the region, it's a reminder that the high profits of high-tech are made possible by masses of cheap, low-tech labor all over the world. 

Building Things: 

• Politicians and voters in the U.S. love to talk up the value of manufacturing. There's a near alchemical belief in manufacturing's ability to create wealth: transforming basic materials into valuable goods with clever processing, bringing back jobs and growing the middle-class through good wages along the way. Unfortunately for less-skilled laborers, the current era of manufacturing innovation is based on building high throughput systems that also minimize the number of humans working the assembly line. At the same time, many manufacturers claim a dearth of workers capable of performing the higher skill programming and upkeep tasks of the sensor-laden, automated systems behind producing goods today. That mismatch of supply and demand is leading to some strange scenarios, like Wisconsin state government luring Foxconn manufacturing facilities (and jobs) in exchange for generous tax breaks, only for Foxconn to then decry a scarcity of skilled workers, and announce plans for importing staff from China rather than hire Wisconsin locals for those positions. 

• Derek Thompson at The Atlantic critiques the common practice of corporate welfare in the form of subsidies and tax breaks for corporate campuses. Whether trying to lure manufacturers like Foxconn and General Electric, or internet giants like Amazon, studies indicate that those efforts do little to increase net jobs, leaving the true winnings for the corporations. 

Social Beings: 

• It turns out that humans on social media often appear more bot-like in their behavior than actual bots do. Human users have erratic sleeping schedules, posting habits, thematically-obsessive content, and string together statements with unusual or incorrect syntax. By comparison, the milder, programmed deviations of bot behavior can seem downright natural. 

• Globe-trotting social media "influencers" with high follower counts and high fashion lifestyles are either too expensive, or too alienating for some brands to continue using for product placement. The latest trend in paid-to-post social media marketing is the use of "nano influencers," aka people with 1,000 or so followers. 

More next week.