Insights 12.20

Design: 

• If you're a hardware startup, you need to maintain great discipline for minimizing feature sets and maintaining focus. Bolt VC gives a breakdown of the toll taken on small teams when they add features or product combinations.

Technology as a Threat: 

• A surveillance arms race is taking place between security (and/or creepiness) for Airbnb hosts and the privacy of their guests. The latest weapon is a script for disabling wi-fi cameras, courtesy of artist/technologist Julian Oliver. 
• The opportunity for labor platforms/marketplaces a la Airbnb and Uber are encouraging some risky practices- namely engineering students being hired to complete professional jobs, often without degrees, oversight or insurance. One of our founders writes about the irresponsibility of such practices. 
• When you're building weapon systems, a report of successful kills can be as much of a boost as getting covered by TechCrunch is for consumer products. A Chinese drone company is getting taken more seriously after reports of ISIS targets being taken out by their tech. 

Building Things: 

• A reminder that breakthrough companies all have different paths to success - CASIO funded the development of their calculator products from selling a ring mounted cigarette holder that become a hit product.
• Tech toy startup Sphero received an unexpected and dramatic boost from a chance intersection of their product development work and Star Wars. 
• The downstream consequences of manufacturing aren't just plaguing the air quality in China- they've turned waters toxic in the former U.S. manufacturing hotbed in Flint, Michigan. Politicians there are calling for a state of emergency. 

 

Brand: 

• Slick branding and graphic design in service of fraud: hipster "artisan" chocolate is revealed to be bait and switch- what was supposedly small batch chocolate produced with innovative processes is actually just regular chocolate purchased in bulk and re-melted. 
• If you go to a big-box retailer this holiday season, careful you don't drown in the sea of Star Wars branded everything. There's so much overreaching in the merchandising push surrounding the new movie that you could live on Star Wars branded goods, if you can call that living. 

More next week.

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.