Design Insights 9.21

Design: 

• What rose gold means. 
• Caterpillar's design for more sustainable, energy-efficient heavy equipment was accomplished outside of Caterpillar's formal lines. A great example of innovation from within - run by the workers themselves, not a department head. 

Roadmapping the Future: 

• Engineering foods that can survive future climate conditions. 
• Perhaps no one is helping us get to a dystopian food future faster than Hormel (of SPAM fame). After acquiring companies like Skippy (peanut butter), Applegate (organic meat) and Muscle Milk (god knows what, really) they are still "hungry for growth" and developing products for something called SPAM Snacks, with "proprietary dried meat technology" It's the same old model of inventing contrary to customer desires and then marketing aggressively that has been hurting the bottom line of other food processing megacorporations.
• UPS is engaging with 3D printing, testing out new services and part fulfillment - in part because it doesn't know what impact additive manufacturing could have on it's current advantages in logistics and distribution. That lack of understanding or vision doesn't bode well for their efforts in an extremely fast moving space. 

Building Things: 

• Since everyone assumed vinyl record production would fade away to nothing, the pressing equipment used to make records is hard to come by. Factories are hacking together their own solutions, making repairs and custom built parts to keep production going. 
• First their crowdfunding platform- now Etsy is getting into the manufacturing business. 
• More and more companies are taking India seriously as a manufacturing center. 

Bias and Brains: 

• Why is it that futurists can imagine robots, flying cars and automated kitchens, but not a world of gender equality or fluidity?

More next week. 

Design Insights 9.14

Design: 

• Edible food packaging could be instrumental in reducing the waste associated with getting grains, gels and liquids from farm or processing facility to your table. While it started as a neat molecular gastronomy trick it's now getting some real development work to make it a potentially viable commercial solution for mass markets. 
• Being a better designer means being a more curious human overall and studying all sorts of things that are not design. Seems obvious enough but worth reiterating. 
• A $200 single serving tea machine. The human ritual of making tea goes back to around 300 AD, at least. It's safe to say that collectively we enjoy the habit overall, and that the act of making and sharing tea plays an important role across many cultures and nations, so maybe we would be better off without a "keurig machine for tea." 

Humanity Intersecting Technology: 

• What happens you spend a lot of time experiencing the world through a robot proxy? Weird things, turns out. A great read on how it feels to filter our human nature through a machine.
• Business Insider says that smartphones and high-fidelity digital maps are helping refugees make their own way and avoid the traps of human traffickers and smugglers. 
• Lower automation technology costs could mean some dining out options become more of a "food delivery" experience, less a human one. 

Designing Space: 

• Giant LEGO-like blocks for adults to build their own life size forts or partitions. It seems a little goofy at first but a modular, flexible function system like that could save mixed-use spaces time, money, and construction/furniture waste over longer term.

Our Weird Future: 

• Robots that identify sea stars and then assassinate them (using a poison injecting needle) in order to preserve coral reefs. It might be helping the oceans but it's going to haunt your dreams. 

More next week. 

Design Insights 9.07

Design: 

• A good concept for making computers more accessible and less disposable from Acer. Unfortunately it's still more of a concept than a real commitment- the maximum upgrade potential of the system is quite limited, so it's the same designed-obsolescence in practice. 
• When technology is miniaturized and interactions are offloaded to smartphones, exactly what an object is for can become opaque. A good read on what devices are hiding, even when they're out in the open.
• Panasonic is bringing back the wheels of steel and relaunching Technics Turntables (in aluminum). 

Bias and Brains: 

• Women in the military have had to wear boots designed for men, and it's contributed to a higher rate of injuries. The Washington Post examines gaps in equipment design, medical care, and prosthetics that have been making life as a military woman more difficult and dangerous. 
• Clear Design Lab founder Kat Ely writes about how bias gets designed into our world and the consequences that we all live with.  

Roadmapping the future: 

• Technology is not an all in one solution. Social, governmental and cultural forces and institutions all play a significant role- in Western world led projects to help developing countries, this math is often wrong, resulting in failure. 
• Toyota puts up $ 50 million for MIT + Stanford to help them figure out smart cars, that might not be self-driving. 
• Farmers want to control their own data, not share it with their suppliers. Startups, including Clear Design Lab client FarmHub, are working to develop systems that empower farmers to collect and use data how they see fit and make resource use more efficient. 

Designing Space: 

• Restaurants are figuring out how to use design elements to turn down the volume. 
• The much hyped "Smart Home" wave is heavy on gimmicks, light on real value produced. We think that problems of the home are often made worse or at least more complicated by technology introduction (tech punctures solitude, creates opportunities for isolation within a family unit) rather than improved by it. Making things better for humans in their most intimate spaces is a complex challenge and few designers/companies are really handling it well. 

 

Misc: 

• Looking at the differences between natural vision and photographic vision. 

More next week.