Insights 1.18

Design: 

• Designing a better toilet has more to do with overcoming human behavior and social norms than engineering challenges. 

(Dis)trusting technology: 

• The smart home is looking haunted:  after a glitch that caused temperatures to go haywire in a bunch of homes, andan ultra-creepy hacker used a connected camera to spy on and harass a child. IoT companies looking to play in the consumer game need to double down on security and reliability instead of pushing out more products and more features. 
• News of mass lead poisoning from tap water in Flint Michigan is a tough reminder that a spoiled environment persists long after the economic gains from corner-cutting industrial production is gone. Electronics often contain a surprising amount of lead (along with many other dangerous but less notorious substances)- finally some consumer electronics companies are making real strides to reduce or remove some of the nasty inputs to their products. 

Building Things: 

• General Electric, one of the biggest names in building things, is moving their headquarters to Boston. Depending on who you ask, this has everything to do with taxes, or it has everything to do with Boston being an innovation hub for the sectors that GE needs to keep winning at like medical and industrial tech. 
• An interesting read on GM working hard to build the best electric cars and battery technology to pull ahead of Tesla.

Up in the air: 

• NASA is lending a helping hand in aerodynamic engineering, hoping to spur their private counterparts into squandering less fuel and reducing emissions. 
• Who has rights to the space above your property? There's no straightforward answer, and a recent case of a man shooting a drone out of the sky over his land is bringing new complexity to the question. 

  

More next week.

Interview with SolidWorks

CLEAR design lab founder Kat Ely spoke with SolidWorks about women in design and engineering and what goes into building great products:

Future for Women in the Industry: “There aren’t any roadblocks in women applying for product design jobs. But, there does seem to be fewer women than men actually in these roles. There are plenty of female graduates but despite that, most industrial design firms are majority male. I’m not sure at what point that happens, maybe its bias in the hiring process or maybe they don’t feel welcome on certain teams. We do see a lot of very qualified female applicants so I know pipeline is not an issue. Hopefully the gender balance is changing to be more reflective of the world we all live in.”

Advice for Women Going Into the Product Design Field: “Apply for jobs you aren’t qualified for because men do it all the time.I was working for probably 8 years before I realized men do that and a lot of women don’t. I would only apply for positions where I thought I was 100% qualified. If the job position said 3-5 years’ experience and I only had 2 years I would think, ‘Oh, I’m not the right fit’ or ‘Oh, I shouldn’t apply to that.’ But, a lot of men will do that and they will get those opportunities because they stretched for it. I always tell women that there is no harm in applying for things, so apply for everything you can, even things you aren’t qualified for. It can’t happen if you don’t get the opportunity, but eventually you will.”

Read the full interview here

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.