Insights 7.31

Design:

• A critical look at the current cultural trends around (a type of) minimalism that is more a lifestyle brand of prescribed tastes, technocratic optimization and conformity than spiritually-inspired asceticism. 
• In what could be read as a counterpoint to the flawless surface fantasies of an inhuman minimalism, Anab Jain writes about the social and practical values of repair/salvage, what she refers to as a practice of "making-as-caring" - a combination of material and immaterial labor as an alternative to the wasteful thoughtlessness of consumer capitalism. 

Virtually There: 

• Bloomberg Businessweek takes a look inside the Facebook/Oculus Rift efforts to build the leading virtual reality platform. Among the technical challenges: making sure the virtual worlds don't make people sick, which is something they apparently test by subjecting a particularly sensitive employee to newly developed content. While it's hardly a subjective sampling, it shows some awareness that products designed for the masses often fail (sometimes harmlessly, sometimes dangerously) to meet the needs of a great diversity of end users. 

Roadmapping the Future:

• As climate change leads to persistent droughts, desalination becomes a more appealing or even vital option for cities and nations bordered by oceans. Scientific American examines Israel's success in developing desalination technologies. Through intensive R&D they have reduced the energy required for the process dramatically: the cost of clean sea water has fallen by 2/3rds since the 1990s. 

Bias and Brains:  

• Black culture has often been the pioneering force for mass culture in the United States and abroad, and just as often the financial and social capital generated by those trends have been ported away from the original communities into whiter, wealthier hands. As much as the internet has democratized distribution, it hasn't upended this pattern of racist cultural theft. Through the lens of memes and viral content, Aria Dean looks at who really benefits when black creative practices taking place in digital spaces reach other networks. 

More next week. 

Insights 7.24

Design:

• Fashion is among the least inclusive segments of design, having a strong preference for certain kinds of bodies and offering limited options for anyone falling outside that narrow spectrum. This New York Times piece looks at how designers are working to expand the possibilities by creating sleek, minimal apparel for wheelchair users, people with chronic medical conditions and other needs that have been ignored in the past. 

Making Technology Work for Us: 

• Physicist, metallurgist, educator and writer Ursula M. Franklin passed away. A thoughtful critic, her writings and lectures became a touchstone for many designers, engineers and educators looking for a more nuanced take on technology's place in society. If you're unfamiliar with her work, the lecture series "The Real World of Technology" is a good place to start. She was a rare individual, carving out a middle path of doing and saying: making practical, ethical contributions to many fields while also developing theoretical frameworks to guide thinking and offer alternatives. In a heavily compromised world where we are pressured to see ourselves on one side or the other, it's a good reminder that we can reject that false bargain and chart a different course. 

Feeding the Future:

• Indigo, a company developing technologies for tougher, drought-resistant wheat and cotton has finished up an investment round of $100MM which is the single largest investment made in AgTech to date. As the impact of climate change becomes impossible to ignore, investors are betting big on agricultural interventions.

(Dis)trusting Technology:

• Prodigious hardware hacker/builder Bunnie Huang and Edward Snowden have teamed up to develop an iPhone case that is supposed to give you a heads-up when your device starts snitching on you. Oh, and Bunnie just announced he is suing the U.S. government for the right to tinker, hack and modify devices on freedom of speech grounds. 

Archiving:  

• The last of the VCR manufacturers is bringing production to a halt. They've been making the devices for 30 years and built 750,000 units last year. Similar to the swansongs of other technologies, the decline of the format has created a small but passionate community of collectors, known to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for especially rare tapes. Whether it's anxiety about an uncertain future, a sense that analog technology possesses a certain humane warmth, or feeling our own mortality reflected back to us, some are unwilling to let the outmoded but familiar slide into the darkness of history completely. 

More next week. 

Insights 7.17

Design:

• What designed obsolescence looks like in the 21st century: abandoned IoT devices and LED lights that could last, but don't. All of the innovation happening on the tech side of things doesn't amount to much if the business models stay stuck in a pattern of unsustainable consumer churn.

Body/Image: 

• Taser, the company synonymous with (usually) less-than-lethal equipment for law enforcement is campaigning hard to achieve similar market dominance in the production, sale and use of body cameras. Given their decades of experience selling into a heavily bureaucratic space they are well-positioned to do just that. This could mean that how much transparency, security and trawling goes on with the data collected by body cameras will be immensely influenced by the tools and features that a single company decides to develop or support. 

Designing Space:

• This apartment complex offers tech-laden "wellness" packages for an extra $125 to $ 225 per month that tune lighting by time, intensity and color to improve sleep quality, along with aromatherapy and other somewhat dubious solutions for whatever day to day weariness ails you. While we're skeptical about the benefits claimed, it shows how low cost sensors and presumptive connectivity of devices are adding new "must have" layers to domestic infrastructure. LeCorbusier, with his conception of homes as machines for living, would probably be on board with some of these mechanistic attempts to tweak and tune our personal biorhythms. 
• Rising rents means getting by with less space, so MIT spin out Ori is preparing to roll out a 21st century take on the Murphy bed - a sort of centralized furniture column that stretches, unfolds and contorts to suit the miscellaneous modes of living and working. 

Automatons: 

• A report from big business consultancy McKinsey & Co. finds that automation is most likely to come for jobs in manufacturing, food service and retail, while the work of bosses: making decisions, planning and managing other humans is on the safer side of the work spectrum. But seasoned CEOs make grave strategic errors and middle managers kill team productivity with aloof practices every day. It may be more difficult for us to imagine that our own generative abilities or powers of insight could to be outmatched and outsourced to code, but that's exactly the sort of cognitive blindspot that could lead to our future management teams being chip-based creations instead of suits from Sloan or HBS. We would also argue that many fabrication roles in manufacturing may seem routine to an outsider without the requisite skills, when in fact there are countless micro-judgments being made by the worker that are difficult for machines to understand.
• That security robot we've mentioned in previous newsletters apparently ran over a child and has been pulled from service. 

More next week.