Design Insights 11.02

Design: 

• Teague, a brand name design firm that's been around since 1926 and calls itself "the original design consultancy" is bowing out of general design consulting to focus on travel. The big, (sometimes) household name design consultancies (with 100+ employees) that primarily serve big, blue chip corporate clients are getting disrupted. Teague is adapting to a changing marketplace through specialization, a bet that seems pretty sound to us, given their track record in that space. 
• It's a total falsehood that China is a great manufacturing nation but a non-contender when it comes to generating new ideas and designs. The latest example of Chinese companies leading with design is Huawei hiring a former Apple creative director to the position of Design Chief. 

Building Things: 

• Greentown Labs, an incubator/co-working space primarily for cleantech companies is planning to double in size. More money and opportunities for technologies that cut fossil fuel consumption is good for all of us. 
• 3D printing metal with a desktop-sized machine. Details are next to nonexistent, but $14 million has been raised, and the team looks solid. We will be keeping an eye on this one. 
• The people behind your products. The complex (and very human) calculations L.L. Bean has to make about hiring to meet demand changes in the market. 

Roadmapping the Future: 

• As device ownership becomes "ownership" - where we are, legally speaking, renting a device and agreeing to certain (ultra fine print) terms and conditions we can lose the right to repair them. iFixit, makers of repair kits for things like iPhones, GoPros and XBoxes, have been fighting the good fight to keep repair a real, viable, legal option even in a culture of disposable electronics. 
• Really thin batteries that could make wearable tech more practical. 
• More and more work is being done remotely, at least some of the time. We work with clients on both U.S. coasts, China, Brazil, Germany, etc. - it's not always as straightforward as sitting down next to someone, but with the right tools and strategy it can have great results. A pretty informative presentation on what to think about when working remotely on design efforts. (47% of the respondants said the output of remote work was worse!)

Designing Space: 

• Designing your home around your art collection. Crazy but cultured. 

Bias and Brains: 

• There seems to be more and more evidence that pipelines are not the problem when it comes to companies building more diverse teams. Restrictive ideas of who is and is not a good fit leads to creating a biased pipeline for hires. Students at HBCUs are taking matters into their own hands and working to build their own solutions. 
• The highest paid female executive in the U.S. is (probably) not a household name. 
• A somewhat creepy article on using brain science to manipulate customers more effectively. In one sense it's nothing new- branding and advertising have always sought to use the lessons of  research to get more business for their clients, on the other hand as we develop more powerful tools to understand the brain do we need to draw new ethical or regulatory lines to prevent outright abuses in the name of commerce? Besides, faux-luxury packaging design gimmicks are needlessly wasteful. 

More next week.

Design Insights. 10.26

Design: 

• Clean, low cost, solar powered lighting is transforming daily life for people in rural areas of India, Uganda, and Kenya. We have worked on a few projects in that product/market space - it's great to see it getting more visibility as an important area for innovation.
• Open sourcing of design is sometimes a great idea, but gaps in skills, tool accessibility and time mean that most plans stay plans, never making it into the living room. Will Holman discusses the challenges, explaining that one of his designs has "...roughly 375,000 views but judging by the (imperfect) metric of the comments, it has only been built 21 times."

Building Things: 

• For hardware nerds: how MOO is making their NFC business card business work - a look at the details of building the systems that support shipping physical technology products that work how they're supposed to. 
• Bolt VC has an excellent series of posts on (hardware) product development, the section on engineering has a particularly good look at what it takes to move the internals of design towards a factory-ready, market ready state. 

Roadmapping the Future: 

• Robots could be be the key to low cost organic produce - saving high labor costs (or low labor costs that come from abusive practices) while skipping the harsh herbicides typical in U.S. agriculture. We're looking forward to seeing what's next to come out of the Deepfield Robotics program at Bosch. 
• The behavioral, cultural and economic realities around ownership and renting of property means the future of smart home technologies could become a new, byzantine set of risks and benefits to evaluate when apartment hunting. 
• A fake IKEA catalog presents a number of thought provoking ideas- including a couch that is drastically more expensive because it is not logging and sharing the data that makes up your daily domestic life. 

Making Technology Work for Us: 

• The elderly are a neglected population when it comes to tech and design innovation that really works for their needs and desires. As the technology layer of the home grows more complex, there will be real opportunities for companies to develop simple, robust and empathetic systems to make sure we're not making the world worse for our elders. 
• Maybe you've forgotten about the online world Second Life- but health practitioners are finding it a useful platform for improving outcomes and community-oriented patient education for people that have difficulty making it to in person classes - whether it's because of the very medical conditions they need to understand better, or simply because they are too busy with jobs and family responsibilities to afford them the time it takes to get to and from the clinic. 

Bias and Brains: 

• Steven Levy of Medium on Silicon Valley's age problem - where the value of experience is undermined by squishy metrics of ambiguous value, like "culture-fit" which has been highlighted as a euphemism for "like the founders." This has proved problematic for building diverse teams as companies scale into the hundreds, the vast majority of their hires are similar to the founders in race, gender, age, and educational background. 
• An ad campaign in New York is fighting to get approval to run and the creators think it's because it uses the word "period." The article highlights the fact that many sexually suggestive ad campaigns involving women (for things like weight loss products or breast implants) have been approved in the past, seemingly without issue. 

More next week.

Design Insights. 10.19

Design: 

• Creating products for local needs & wants with mass production methods. A look at the astounding variety of phones available in Shenzhen, created with local rather than 'universal' tastes in mind. With rapid progress being made in 3D printing and robotic assembly, this kind of locally-tuned product mix could be the norm in 10-15 years. 
• A hardware product to enable a "frictionless Skype" experience - basically something that is as easy and intuitive as the old landline phones, plus video. We've been promised this videophone future many, many times before. Maybe this time will be different; Apple and Sony manufacturing superpower Foxconn is investing in the project, as well as being the contract manufacturer in charge of building the final units. 
• The insane testing work that Apple does to design and engineer their vision of the perfect user experience for their hardware products. 

Machines for Moving: 

• Huge, self-driving vehicles are now in use in mining operations. For an industry that sees its need for labor fluctuate wildly with shifts in global demand, the appeal of the autonomous is huge. Mining companies also don't have a stellar history of fair or even humane treatment of labor so they have compelling PR reasons to have fewer human eyes and ears around. 
• CyPhy Works, a slightly-dystopian, cyberpunk sounding drone company has just raised a $ 22 million dollar round of investment, with brown truck, brown parcel company UPS participating as an investor - perhaps looking to place some strategic drone delivery bets in order to prevent Amazon from cutting them out of the delivery game with their own drone efforts. 

Big Business: 

• Vicks is adding a connected thermometer to their lineup of products. It's too early to say if it will edge out the startup that it seems to be mimicking closely (Kinsa), but it's a challenge to any hardware startup when their brilliant insight and excellent execution of a product is up against a multi-decade brand that has deep associative powers in a market that a new company can't easily achieve. 
• Big, non-tech companies are looking to bring some startup tech perspectives into their organizations in order to maintain their market share, even as the once solid foundations they have built (distribution, brand recognition, economies of scale) turn sandy and shifting. We wonder if better (and cheaper) results could instead come from giving greater autonomy to a limited number of pilot locations which distributes decision making closer to the work being done. 

Behavior: 

• Formalized end of life plans in the U.S. are not as common or detailed as it should be - and means a lot of totally preventable problems come up for families at times when they are least prepared to deal with them. A new app called CAKE is trying to simplify the process in a human way and make thinking about our own mortality a little easier. 
• Hangovers are hurting the economy. The CDC says it costs $ 249 billion a year in the U.S. (compare this to the ~$6 billion or so productivity hit from influenza). Maybe if so many workers didn't dread going back to work on Monday, they wouldn't hit the bottle so hard on the weekend. 

More next week.