Insights 8.22

Design:

• Design icon John Maeda is moving on from the world of venture capital at Kleiner Perkins to Automattic - the makers of WordPress among other things. 

Feeding the Future: 

• As Hormel's most notorious product, SPAM is a symbol of everything from post-war food technology to how commodities get gussied up with branding. Produced at a rate of 1.5 million cans per week, SPAM is international hit, a regular component of diets across the world but as demographics and attitudes around food in the U.S. have shifted over the years, Hormel has sometimes struggled to maintain its market relevancy there. Bloomberg looks at Hormel's use of anthropologists to develop a new directions in their product offerings and determine which companies make sense to acquire. There's a real difference between understanding the elements of culture to better meet user needs versus understanding how to coerce customers with marketing- in the short history of big, corporate food companies they have mostly relied on the latter. Time will tell where Hormel's efforts fit on that spectrum. 

Communication:

• In an attention economy where marketers, advertisers and UI/UX designers are constantly concerned with the metrics of engagement, the comment sections that follow news stories generate a great deal of activity, an unfortunate percentage of which is made up of toxic vitriol. NPR (with their relative independence from advertising concerns) has decided that it's not worth keeping the troll cave that is the comment section open. Their decision was driven in large part by a deeper analysis to determine that their actual listening audience and the commenters were not really the same crowd. It underscores the difference between organizations that are driven by mission instead of purely focusing on profit at any societal cost. 

Roadmapping the Future:  

• From banks to tech companies, many are betting on (and pushing for) a cashless future, where all transactions pass through an electronic portal at some point. While this is portrayed as a more convenient, secure, and clean way of moving money around, there's also the potential for huge losses in terms of privacy, community autonomy and the kinds of 'gray markets' that allow those on the lower end of the economic food chain to survive. 
• It can be easy to forget that many 'disruptive' technologies intended to democratize access are still far from evenly distributed and leave those promises of revolutionary change unfulfilled. For example, many in the U.S. still do not have reliable access to the internet - now a library in Denver is letting patrons take out Wi-Fi hotspots to help close the gap on the digital divide. 

Building Things:  

• One of the recurring obstacles faced by wearable tech companies is the variability of human bodies, including things like skin sensitivity. McDonald's just pulled a simple pedometer product for kids based on complaints of skin irritation. 

More next week. 

Insights 8.14

Design:

• In what seems like a dramatic overreach of intellectual property laws, the UK has extended copyrights for manufactured object designs to the life of the the designer plus 70 years. While it's good for designers to have some time to profit from their creative labors, 100 years of copyright protections makes all kinds of innovation and remixing impossible. It's also a blow to the small but positive trend of people using 3D printing to replace components and keep their appliances or furniture in good repair when manufacturers stop supporting old models. We believe that society should be moving to more open-source and publicly accessible versions of technologies and design over time, instead of entrenching the powers of broken models that were won long ago.
• The BBC on why the textiles that clad mass transit seats are ugly.

Labor Pains: 

• While the marketing language around the gig economy emphasizes freedom, flexibility and implausibly optimistic earnings for any hard hustling Horatio Alger types, the reality can be one of continual precarity. In an unusual and maybe unprecedented take on an old labor tactic, a crowdfunding campaign has been set up to fund a strike by gig economy workers upset with sudden changes in how and how much delivery drivers are paid. While the broad reach of networks might help finance strike activities, it also allows companies to source replacement workers with exceptional ease and speed. 

(Dis)trusting Technology:

• Two stories from DEFCON on how the internet of things brings new vulnerabilities into play: a hack to install ransomware on a "smart" thermostat - threatening to raise your home's temperature to 99° F unless you pay some amount of bitcoin to the hijacker. While this exploit required physical access, the fact that an electrical engineer found it relatively easy to hack 12 out of 16 connected door locks might make that a less daunting task. 

Behavior:  

• Living in the most surveilled era of human history has demonstrable effects on personal expression and cultural production. In the case of social media context collapse we self-edit for our real or imagined audiences composed of friends, co-workers, bosses, ex-lovers and would-be clients. While the consequences of poor personal editorial oversight might be losing followers or losing a job, the stakes are even higher for people who have been processed through the prison system. When it's a choice between physical freedom and freedom of expression, artists respond in various ways - in some cases completely switching up styles or abstaining from content that was once the mainstay of their work. Fader looks at the impact of prison and parole on the artistic output of several rappers, with the implication that all those eyes on our actions may be depriving us of more than we can ever know. When judgement fueled by scraps of information abounds, we lose the opportunity to hear certain stories, try out new ideas or more fully comprehend the not-safe-for-social media aspects of one another.

More next week. 

Insights 8.08

Design:

• Apple has substituted the revolver gun emoji with a squirt gun. While there are unicode standards, what appears is up to individual companies to decide - leading to a sort of visual dialect that is reflective of particular corporate viewpoints on aesthetics, meaning and sometimes the carefully considered political implications behind the symbols. 

Building Things: 

• The political and popular focus of creating manufacturing jobs in the U.S. is wrongheaded in many ways. The New York Times has a good analysis of why Americans are nostalgic for industrial jobs, even when it makes little sense to be. Automation has made manufacturing at volume possible with far fewer human hands and the value we derive from digital products gives us more utility with less material consumed/fewer devices. These are ultimately positive trends in many ways, but in the face of rising inequality and stagnating real wages for the working classes, there's a desire for a labor panacea that looks like something like mid-20th century manufacturing. It's clear now that those factory jobs are never coming back and we will need to figure out a more sensible focus for driving employment in the 21st century. There are few obvious candidates for labor intensive growth that are purely private - but major reworking and repair of failing infrastructure (bridges, water supply systems, etc.) would both solve real issues and create a large number of jobs, many of which would require fewer skills upfront and the variety of tasks required makes the work extremely difficult to automate. 
• Facebook's hardware lab is getting a fresh wave of press - our best guess is they're looking to promote the opportunities there in order to draw talented designers and engineers with experience building physical systems from places like the R&D labs of Google and Amazon. Facebook certainly has the deep pockets and well equipped shops to build almost whatever they want, less clear is the larger philosophy driving the technology that will come out of their lab and how they will manage project teams. Connecting the world has always been the main tag of Facebook's mission statement, but we don't know yet if the tech projects coming out of their lab will always be bound to the same goal (with or without the aspect of monetizing through advertising). 

Upgrading Ourselves:

• Performance enhancing drugs may be banned in professional and Olympic sports, but unconventional methods like electronic brain stimulation are gaining in popularity among elite athletes to gain a competitive edge. Their actual results (and potential negative side effects) are still unclear and unconfirmed, allowing these techniques and devices to operate in a grey area for the time being. 

Shaping Cities:  

• Google is making efforts to extend their mapping to the 'blank spaces' of cities- emergent and ad hoc communities that are often unrecognized as legitimate places by cities and states. 

More next week.