Design Insights 11.09

Design: 

• Disney Research unveils a project to help you connect anything to anything else, basically. Watch the video- it's pretty amazing. One exciting possibility is enabling "fringe users" to develop solutions for themselves in cases where the market may be too small or fractured for a company to justify the costs of tooling, assembly and distribution. 3D printing has long been heralded as a technology that "democratizes design" but access, CAD modeling skills and time required for the input part of that equation hasn't caught up. This project looks like it could change that equation. 

Body/Image: 

• Companies frequently miss business opportunities because of stereotypes creeping into their design and product development efforts - e.g. "older adults don't care about style, just comfort." NPR's story on the booming business in stylish and comfortable footwear proves otherwise. There are huge market opportunities for products that respect their users identities and interests, instead of merely "solving a problem." 
• Imaging startup Body Labs just raised $ 8 million to continue developing theirbody scanning/measuring tools. With wearable technology getting smaller, softer, and more pervasive, what Body Labs is building could be a boon to apparel companies that are ready to step fully into the 21st century. 

Feeding the Future: 

• Grove Labs just put their aquaponics device for the home on kickstarter and it's doing amazingly well. It's an interesting product category development or extension (is it fair to call it a kitchen appliance?) and would certainly be welcome during long winters or remote areas where fresh, quality herbs and produce are hard to come by. 
• Some interesting agriculture-specific robotics solutions are being designed and developed by farmers in South Dakota, instead of college research labs or tech-hub cities. 

Designing Space: 

• Like many high impact design solutions, the cardboard bedroom furniture set is far from pretty. If companies like IKEA, Target, Walmart and others really want to make a difference on their sustainability efforts and carbon footprints, they would do well to invest in the design, development and marketing of projects like this instead of heavy, but ultimately not much more durable particle board products we are all familiar with.
• Prefab housing from Muji looks habitable and stylish in its simplicity, more cabin and less trailer. 

Machines for Moving: 

• Terrestrial, six-wheeled vehicles for delivering packages to your door, from the founders of Skype. We think they are underestimating the creative ways in which people could mess with their friendly looking robots, but in many ways it makes more sense than drones in the sky. For now, there are too many psychological and logistical sticking points for air-based drones to get implemented in the U.S. for something like parcel delivery.

  
More next week.
 

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.