Insights 4.17

 

Design: 

• The Dyson hand dryer turns out to be one of the worst offenders for spreading viruses. It's won a bunch of awards over the years- which is a pretty strong indictment of design culture in the 21st century - if it looks good and you tell us it's better, we'll take your word for it and give you a gold star.
• Fast food companies will go to absurd lengths to transform commodity inputs into signatures of their corporate brands. Case in point: Taco Bell spent two years tuning the characteristics and behavior of cheese in their dishes. 

Roadmapping the Future : 

• Regina Dugan, the head of Google's ATAP division, responsible for ambitious mobile tech/interface products is moving to Facebook to start a similar program there. We've seen over the last few years Facebook digging much deeper into the world of hardware (acquiring VR startup Oculus Rift and drone maker Ascenta) and this is the strongest signal yet that it's only going to intensify those efforts.

Feeding the Future: 

• There's a lot to hate on with the latest internet of things kitchen gadget Juicero - essentially a Keurig type machine for fresh juice. As with the Keurig, it's business model is predicated on wasteful, proprietary consumables. Perhaps most interesting is the QR code element - it's mostly used to create product lock-in and avoid 3rd party vendors creating compatible consumables (as happened to Keurig), but it is also used to provide data on freshness, source of the produce, etc. It's a big leap for food consumed at home to have freshness and quality validated by a machine, rather than our human senses. As more companies set out to tackle automated food service for sectors like fast food, getting people accustomed to trusting technology with what they are about to eat is one of many psychological and cultural challenges they will face - the Juicero tech (if it becomes widely adopted) may be laying the groundwork for such changes. The systems to support such tracking efforts could also dramatically reduce the cost of food recalls - with equipment automatically rejecting any items covered by a recall. We still think it's a fairly environmentally irresponsible product, but it contains some interesting (and maybe more problematic) ideas about what the future of food will look like. 

Bias and Brains: 

• A movie studio commissioned a visual effects company to "shift ethnicity" of white actors for the upcoming live action version of Ghost in the Shell. It's one of many appallingly racist stories of the industry to come out of Hollywood recently, with studios seemingly doing everything they can to put white faces up front and exclude everyone else. 

More next week.

Insights 4.11

Design: 

• An amazing look at the incomplete projects of Zaha Hadid.

Making Technology Work for Us : 

• While innovation has probably never been discussed more, the most meaningful and broadly distributed positive impacts of technological change have slowed over generations in the United States. To keep building towards a better future for all, instead of just injecting VR tech into advertising, we will need different development models that have societal metrics, not just clicks or dollars. 

Automatons: 

• A different approach to bipedal movement makes for a robot that can deal with the complexities of the natural and human made worlds - a reminder that while nature can be a good starting point, mimicking it's structures and succeeding can be more difficult. Sometimes reinventing the wheel is the right approach. This robot is (as far as we know) going to stay in the Google/Alphabet stable, even as they sell off other robotics units. 

Virtually There : 

• Augmented Reality company Magic Leap has more patent filings, hinting at a world that will appear differently to audiences, depending on factors like age. It's not hard to imagine a paywall-tiered system where what we see is based on what we spend- class based consumption written right onto our eyeballs. It's a fascinating technology, let's hope developers figure out some better uses. 

Building Things: 

• When the focus is always on building new things and innovating, we devalue the vital task of maintenance. From crumbling infrastructure to short lived appliances, to transition to a sustainable future we're going to need many more maintainers.
• The global impact of fads: colored pencil manufacturers are having trouble keeping production high enough to meet demand, driven by the boom in coloring books for adults. 

More next week.

Insights 4.03

 

Design: 

• Tesla unveiled their latest car, the Model 3 - and it doesn't have a grill. In jettisoning what is typically a primary feature to distinguish one brand from another, Tesla is making a bold design choice that underscores their commitment to building a new future for automobiles rather than following closely in the footsteps of the auto industry.
• The massive international design consultancies that largely defined what commercial design was in the 20th century continue to bend, break, sell off or retool in the face of a much more dynamic corporate ecosystem. The latest chapter is frog design's Chief Creative Officer taking off to join a digital agency, and frog announcing that they will not be filling the position - instead they are going to spread the responsibilities across several people. 

Feeding the Future : 

• Given the strong forces of culture surrounding food, it can be hard to change our diets for improved personal and ecological health even when we know the hard facts about damage done by consuming large quantities of animal-derived products. By introducing a blend of beef and mushroom to school cafeterias, the Culinary Institute of America & the Mushroom Council (a pro-fungi interest/industry group) there's a hope to transition the red meat and dairy heavy diets of U.S. residents to a less resource intensive way of eating. With climate change reducing water supplies and arable lands all over the world, smart transitional concepts like this are a welcome tactic. 

Technology as a Threat: 

• Hijacking and "upgrading" insects to turn them into low cost, high performance drones. This is a really, really bad precedent but will almost certainly prove too tempting to not be readily adopted by intelligence or military organizations around the world. 

Building Things: 

• A helpful story of the inner workings at Lytro, and what it takes to pivot a hardware company. 

P.S. - we are hiring: (We found our operations person already!) We're looking for designer / engineer type people (a formal degree in either field is not a requirement, overall design/building aptitude and attitude are more important to us.)

More next week.