Insights 1.10

Design: 

• It looks like UI / UX design as we know it is heading into a period of sea change - from a focus on the visuals, graphics, and animations of apps to natural language processing through voice (Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana) and texting/chatbot interfacing. There is some good overview on the topic fromThe Verge and Fast Company this week. We're most interested in how the tech industry's wars for talent will be affected - tech companies were already luring writers from ad agencies to work on "content creation" aspects of their business models, but a strong pivot from the visual app to the language focused chatbot or digital assistant may mean that writers are the next must-have creatives for tech companies. 

Virtually There: 

• The market has been ditching big local processing power in favor of mobile and cloud, but the high computational demands of virtual reality might be putting a bend in that adoption curve. If the speed isn't spot on, many users find themselves feeling sick.
• Lenovo and Google are getting together to put the augmented reality/3D mapping Tango technology into sub $500 smartphones, possibly as soon as this summer. Expect to see lots of startups figuring out business models leveraging the idea of consumers having AR tech in their pockets by default. 

Feeding the Future: 

• As profit margins on farm products decline, equipment sharing is starting to look like a good way to defray big equipment costs. A cursory search of the website for imaging drones came up empty, maybe because many imaging drone companies targeting agriculture are trying to develop it as a service themselves, rather than sell the hardware to the end user. 

Behavior:  

• Rethinking the dating app to combat harassment and preserve privacy. 
• The rise of consumable goods subscriptions can be seen as a side-effect of having a whole world of shopping available online, 24/7. So far, startups are winning the e-commerce turned curated subscription model. 

 

More next week.

Insights 1.03

 

Design: 

• 3D printing isn't all it's cracked up to be for producing things like consumer goods. But for niche, high-performance product categories it can be a godsend.This article does a good job laying out how falling printing costs, improved technologies and industry insider knowledge can combine for huge product improvements in small markets. 

Body/Image: 

• Apparent workers in the U.S. have become so sedentary that we need a new type of pants that help us to not move, comfortably. The rise of inactive wear is upon us. 
• Louis Vuitton's latest ad campaign model is videogame character. Not sure whether fashion fully embracing literally unrealistic beauty standards is a step forward or step back. 

Building Things: 

• The Marine Corps doesn't like the robots it got for Xmas this year from Boston Dynamics because they are too loud, among other things.
• 3D printing lots of tiny little parts for the movie Anomalisa. 

Big Business: 

• Regulations are finally coming to do away with the needlessly damaging scourge of tiny plastic beads.  
• The biggest meatpacking company in the world is betting heavily on robots. Considering production butchery hits the three D's of to-be-automated work pretty squarely (dull, dirty and dangerous) it's a more natural fit for automation than many other industries that have already made big steps to introduce robots into their labor mix.

Drones: 

• Using drones to inspect structures. Given some prominent infrastructure failures of recent history and costs of human inspection teams, it could save lives and money.
• North Dakota is striving to build a drone industry on the back of its open spaces and aviation resources. Our resident midwesterner thinks their biggest obstacle will be getting top talent to relocate the great plains as the companies outgrow what can be supplied by the local labor pool.

  

More next week.

Insights 12.28

Design: 

• How the world's military forces try to blend in. 
• Bold, bright lipstick colors created at a craft-production scale. 

Roadmapping the Future: 

• How climate change, war and scarcity (whether perceived or real) can collide for the worse. Sensible policies and sound science targeted on the right causes could be the peaceful way out of a global quagmire. 

Building Things: 

• Magnetic material science helps soft robots be a little more sensitive. 
• How long the joy of a physical gift sticks around, and how a repair relationship with our possessions could be good for our finances and environment. 

Our Weird Future: 

• Reanimating fish carcasses through robotics. Let's just all hope this starts and ends with fish. 
• Tech tycoons with a keen interest in space exploration (as evidenced by the gobs of money they throw at it) continue to use social media to needle one another. 
• Absolut (yes, that Absolut) sets up an internet of things testing lab. Finally, your kitchen will know when you're ready to drown your sorrows. When it comes to companies more associated with vices than virtues, we're not sure that gaining greater awareness of end users is necessarily a good thing. 

 

Branded:  

• A dispute about signage photobombing architecture. 
• An insightful take on the Mast Brothers chocolate scandal and how we collectively buy into the unlikely culture and "authenticity" of products with dubious intrinsic value.

Bias and Brains:  

• Not only are women typically paid less than their male counterparts in the U.S. -they also get charged more for the same products, repackaged and re-targeted.