Insights 12.13

Insights. 

Design: 

• A plastic pantone: All of the colors LEGO has produced over the years. 
• We found this really weird page from the IDSA (Industrial Designers Dociety of America) supposedly explaining the product design process. To us it seems wildly out of step with current best practices and the realities of product development in the 21st century (no mention or indication of software layer, for instance). 
• Visualizing YOLO. 

Communication: 

• How to translate the complexities of hip-hop to American Sign Language. 

Building Things: 

• A mesmerizing video of an automated production line - from injection molding to final assembly, all with robotics.
• Early adopters of the "hoverboard" craze are getting burned, so to speak. More and more cases of the devices bursting into flames have led Amazon to suspend sales of the devices. 

Big Business: 

• Dow and DuPont are getting together - being an industrial giant seems to pale in comparison to the returns enabled by the digital realm and the rise of China's industrial exports. 
• Magic Leap, the augmented reality startup just raised $ 827 million to put 3D images into your eye space. So- pop up ads are about to get much, much worse. 

 

Branded:  

• What goes into taking consistently excellent photos for an e-commerce company like Wayfair.
• The effects of color on brand perception - it's a bit more complicated and connected than the article gets at, but it's a helpful jumping off point for considering the subconscious impacts of design choices. 

More next week. 

Insights 12.06

Design: 

• A smart, simple design that Uber is rolling out to improve user experience and avoid which-car confusion. 
• Beautiful behind the scenes of Nervous System's 3D printing project with New Balance shoes. 

(Dis)trusting Technology: 

• As toys become connected, data breaches are leading to children's information falling into the wrong hands. 
• Your phone usage could be providing credit-worthiness clues to lenders using unconventional and counterintuitive metrics. On one hand, it's questionable because we can't know exactly what we're being graded on, on the other hand it may end up more accurate and fair at assessing risk than the status quo of credit reporting. 
• Examining the ethical lines between engagement and addiction. Increasingly, it looks like a lot of the products and services claiming to make our lives better are screwing us out of our free time by manipulating our brains- all for the sake of selling ads. 

Roadmapping the Future: 

• How to know when your business model needs reinventing. 
• If you're a car company worried about the likes of Tesla, Uber or Apple coming to eat your lunch with self driving cars, what do you do? Maybe build robots  - the domain knowledge of building fairly large, high complexity devices like cars for a huge range of user needs just might make a great foundation for developinghighly capable robots for the home. Toyota is on it, and Honda has certainly made some big steps in that direction over the years. The big question is whether they will double down on a future where their relevancy in cars is limited, or hope for a convergent path with self-driving technologies that doesn't end in their total disruption. 

 

Branded:  

• A ridiculous single-serving soda product from Keurig is floundering. It's a confluence of problems- unlike their coffee makers, it seems like it's not actually more convenient, it's too slow and expensive. The larger problem is that it underscores the negative impressions of their brand as putting profits ahead of environmental responsibility,at a time when they should be doing everything they can to turn things around via more sustainable product development practices.  

 

More next week.

Design Insights 11.30

Design insights. 

Design: 

• Anyone who does day in, day out design work can tell you how difficult and complex it is to maintain quality and consistency across an organization. This amazingly specific set of rules for animating the TV show King of the Hill is a pretty good look at the efforts required to preserve your original vision over time. 

(Dis)trusting Technology: 

• The ethics of micropayments and intentionally sub-optimal user experiences. When a paywall is fractured into a thousand tiny $ hurdles, the system begins to look more like a casino than a product. 

Feeding the Future: 

• Drone maker DJI, mostly known for their high-end consumer products is getting into the agricultural drone market with a machine capable of spraying crops with pesticides or herbicides. 

Designing Space: 

• Ikea has sponsored an innovation lab of sorts in order to predict and plan for how domestic space will look and function in the future. 
• The Restart Project offers a sort of counterpoint to the Ikea innovation lab, looking at a scrappier future (and present) where we work to fix and conserve products to reduce consumption, rather than somehow shopping ourselves to a better future. 

Building Things: 

• For your sobering post-black Friday consideration: the incredible speed and scale of manufacturing efforts in China to feed U.S. fads. 
• A great behind the scenes look at the rise and struggles of the repair-advocacy and equipment company iFixit. 

Branded:  

• The burden of brand: a Red Wing Pottery store in Minnesota is shutting down, citing bad blood and outright rage directed towards the company that goes back to decades old labor disputes. Despite having different ownership, the animosity has stuck firmly in place. 
• When it comes to places synonymous with innovation Boston is behind places like Silicon Valley despite being where the technology foundations that underpin the likes of Apple, Instagram and Google come from. Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe makes a case for Bostonians to rebrand the city as the R &D lab for the world. 

Our Weird Future:  

• Clothing for your domestic robot. Someday teenagers will mock Roombas for their out of date fashion choices. 

  
More next week.